https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/impeachment-inquiry-a-senate-trial-is-likely-to-backfire-on-democrats-1.943038

Passing the baton to the Senate would invite a perfunctory trial and acquittal. There are better options.

For Democrats, these are the best of times and the worst of times.

Two weeks of impeachment inquiry testimony by administration officials have painted a stark picture of a US president who allegedly tried to leverage US foreign policy to smear his political opponents. Few facts in the case are disputed, although Donald Trump denies any wrongdoing.

Yet Republicans remain unmoved. A vote on articles of impeachment is currently anticipated in December in the Democrat-controlled House. That would mandate a trial in the Senate but as things stand, it would receive few, if any, Republican votes.

The president has claimed immunity and directed current and past officials not to testify, congressional subpoenas notwithstanding. He has flatly refused to co-operate with the investigation, despite US district judge Ketanji Brown Jackson ruling that “no one is above the law” and that “presidents are not kings”.

Ms Jackson was ruling in the case of former White House counsel Don McGahn in relation to the inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election but it could have implications for those subpoenaed to testify in the impeachment hearing.

Despite White House stonewalling, a series of witnesses have given a detailed account of how Mr Trump empowered his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to try to leverage promises of a potential White House meeting and $400 million in US military aid for political gain. The president allegedly threatened to withhold the aid from newly elected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy if he failed to announce an investigation into unsubstantiated corruption claims against Hunter Biden, the son of his leading Democratic rival Joe Biden.

Earlier this month acting Ukrainian ambassador William Taylor and state department official George Kent testified that the Trump administration urged Ukrainian officials to announce such an investigation, as well as another into a long-debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 US election on behalf of Democrats. Mr Kent was the first of many witnesses to dismiss that theory.

During the lengthy hearing, Marie Yovanovich, the former US ambassador to Ukraine, described a campaign of personal vilification against her by Mr Giuliani and his Ukrainian associates because of her efforts to combat corruption. As she took the stand, Mr Trump even fired off a tweet in real time that read: “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad,” leading the visibly shaken envoy to admit: “It’s very intimidating” when his message was displayed on screens in the hearing room. In the eyes of many, that constituted unlawful witness intimidation in real-time.

Several days later, four witnesses described the July 25 phone call with Mr Zelenskiy, which forms the crux of the case. They said they found it shocking, improper and possibly illegal when Mr Trump demanded the investigations.

And last Wednesday, US ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland confirmed that there had been a quid pro quo demanded of Ukraine, and that he told Ukrainian officials the aid and White House meeting would not be forthcoming without an investigation announcement. “Everyone was in the loop,” he said. “It was no secret.”

He said US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and US Vice President Mike Pence were all aware of, and party to, this alleged attempted shakedown.

Meanwhile former national security staff expert Fiona Hill has confirmed all senior officials were fully aware of the effort, which she called “a domestic political errand” entirely unrelated to national security. She rebuked Republican committee members and, implicitly, Mr Trump, for promoting the conspiracy theory about Ukrainian interference and advocating “politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests”.

There does, however, remain one significant hole in the case against Mr Trump.

No senior official has yet confirmed that the president specifically told them there was a quid pro quo required of Ukraine. Indeed, Mr Sondland testified that Mr Trump had denied there was one.

However, almost all of the witnesses, including Mr Sondland, stated that it was understood by everyone that a quid pro quo was implicit in the demands from the White House.

Republicans emphasise that Ukraine eventually received the aid in September without any investigations being announced.  But two days before the aid was released, the whistleblower account of this scheme and plans for a congressional investigation were made public. The timeline indicates that the president’s plan was abandoned only because it was exposed.

Still, the withholding of documents and senior witnesses puts Democrats in a real bind. Do they proceed without so much critical evidence or allow themselves to be dragged into endless court battles?

They appear inclined to press forward with what evidence they have. But for all its heft, it isn’t swaying Republicans.

Mr Trump used to boast that if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, he wouldn’t lose supporters. That certainly seems to include Republicans in Congress.

It has been deeply alarming to watch the entire GOP circle the wagons around him and effectively defend the idea that leveraging US foreign policy for personal political advantage is acceptable presidential conduct.

As Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell insists, as things stand, there is little chance Mr Trump would be convicted and removed from office by a Republican-majority Senate.

Democrats need to urgently reconsider options other than rushing headlong towards an impeachment trial. Despite the upcoming election season, Democrats could continue with the impeachment inquiry without a strict deadline to develop the case.

They need to secure sworn testimony from former national security adviser John Bolton, who has asked a court to decide if he should testify, as well as Mr Pompeo, Mr Giuliani, Mr Mulvaney and Mr Pence. With patience, Democrats could probably obtain most key testimonies, as suggested by the ruling in the case involving Mr McGahn.

They could also expand the inquiry into numerous other areas of possible presidential malfeasance.

One obvious example is pay-offs to various mistresses in the run-up to the 2016 election in violation of campaign finance laws, acts for which Mr Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, is serving a lengthy prison sentence.

They could scrutinize shady and suggestive dealings between Mr Trump, Mr Giuliani and former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko.

Additionally, Mr Trump may have lied in written answers to former special counsel Robert Mueller. There are dozens of allegations of sexual assault against him. The possibilities abound.

Expanding the scope and length of the inquiry has downsides but it increases the chance that, at some point, Republican patience with Mr Trump may evaporate, as happened with Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal in the 1970s.

Or the House could simply censure the president rather than adopting articles of impeachment. That would denounce his conduct but not seek to remove him or hand control of the process to the Senate.

Passing the baton to the Senate would, under current circumstances, invite either a perfunctory trial and acquittal, or a through-the-looking-glass procedure in which Democrats and the Bidens could be placed on trial instead.

Seeking a political death by a thousand cuts for Mr Trump, rather than a take-down in one fell swoop, might be more effective with the public.

As things stand, a Senate trial is likely to backfire on Democrats. Since they have several viable options, it would be a far, far better thing for Democrats to avoid such a blunder.

https://agsiw.org/tehrans-woes-open-diplomatic-opportunities-for-riyadh/

Tehran’s difficulties, including major unrest at home and in Iraq and Lebanon, could make the Islamic Republic more amenable to a real compromise with its Gulf Arab neighbors.

Saudi Arabia has begun to explore the potential for easing, or even resolving, a number of long-standing regional confrontations. In Yemen, regarding Qatar, and exploring prospects for bilateral and multilateral talks with Iran, Riyadh is showing signs of a new sense of confidence regarding the potential for new understandings. In part, each of these projects is prompted by a growing sense that these ongoing confrontations have begun to accumulate diminishing returns. And all three initiatives appear to be linked to growing signs that Iran’s fortunes and regional standing are beginning to fray badly. This has led to hopes that Tehran’s difficulties, including major unrest at home and in Iraq and Lebanon, could make the Islamic Republic more amenable to a real compromise with its Gulf Arab neighbors.

For much of the past 15 years, as Iran’s regional fortunes appeared to only go from strength to strength, in large part as an unintended consequence of U.S. policies, Iran has shown more willingness to enter into direct talks on regional arrangements with Gulf Arab countries. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, in particular, have generally avoided anything that smacked of far-reaching negotiations with Iran. They have maintained that the Islamic Republic cannot be trusted because of its foundational commitment to export its revolution, and that Iran often behaves like the vanguard of a regional movement that threatens their interests, rather than a “normal” neighboring state.

But the deeper concern has been that Tehran gained undue advantage largely as an unintended consequence of contingent events that were originally unconnected to Iran. From the Saudi and Emirati perspectives, Iran was the primary beneficiary of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the earlier ouster of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Moreover, Iran was seen as benefiting from the destabilization of leading Arab republics in the Arab Spring uprisings that began in 2010. And, finally, Iran has been widely viewed as a primary beneficiary of a perceived U.S. disengagement from the Middle East, the Gulf in particular, and the concomitant rise in Russian influence, particularly in Syria. Yet all of these developments were regarded as distortions, rather than reflections, of the actual balance of power in the region and as reversible if not simply unsustainable. Iran had gone from strength to strength for more than a decade, but, it was widely felt in Gulf states, Tehran was also overconfident and overextended, benefiting more from its adversaries’ mistakes than its own achievements.

Therefore, Saudi Arabia has been, in effect, postponing the inevitable dialogue with Iran, hoping to enter into talks that reflect what Riyadh regards as the actual balance of power in the region and that would involve serious compromises rather than an effort by Tehran to get Arab states to effectively acknowledge Iran’s hegemony in large parts of the Arab northern Middle East. That moment may have arrived, given a series of setbacks besetting the Iranian regime.

“Maximum Pressure” versus “Maximum Resistance”

Since the administration of President Donald J. Trump withdrew the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear agreement and instituted the “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran, there has been a powerful momentum against the fortunes of the Iranian government. The economic sanctions imposed by Washington since May 2018 have badly damaged the Iranian economy. Iran is estimated to be on course for a 9.5% economic contraction in 2019, with only Libya and Venezuela suffering greater economic declines. Iran’s ability to sell its oil has been reduced dramatically, and it is increasingly frozen out of the international, dollar-based economy. The efforts of European governments to encourage their multinational corporations to continue to trade with Iran largely failed due to threats from the U.S. Treasury Department. And the European effort to create a special purpose vehicle to facilitate payments in nondollar denominations has so far proved unsuccessful.

Yet sanctions, no matter how effective, were never likely to produce regime change and, indeed, on their own were not even likely to produce positive policy changes. As long as Iran did not feel that its strategic regional gains were threatened, financial warfare was always more likely to prompt more obdurate policies than lay the groundwork for compromise.

Iran’s Crisis in Lebanon and Iraq

Nonetheless, Iran’s position in the Arab world has been suddenly threatened by widespread and sustained political protests in Iraq and Lebanon. These movements are very different and cannot be conflated. While in neither case is Iran a primary target of the demonstrators, the regional impact of the uprisings directly threatens Iran’s influence in two of the Arab countries in which it is most powerful. Lebanese and Iraqi demonstrators began by condemning their own leaders and pursuing a set of socioeconomic and governance grievances. Yet in both cases, to address these concerns, demonstrators are demanding substantive and even structural changes to the existing political order. This is a profound threat to Iranian hegemony because in Iraq and Lebanon the existing arrangements effectively maximize the potential influence of Iran’s clients and interests.

Therefore, Iran and its local clients, such as Hezbollah and Amal in Lebanon and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, have increasingly adopted a belligerent attitude toward the demonstrators. All have increasingly denounced the protesters as seditious and disloyal agents of nefarious foreign influence. In Iraq, a brutal crackdown by the state and pro-Iranian militia groups has taken over 320 lives, while Hezbollah and Amal have thus far largely restricted themselves to threats and intimidation. However, the political impact of all of this on Iran’s long-term interests in Iraq and Lebanon can only be extremely negative. A November 19 news dump of hundreds of Iranian intelligence cables illustrating Tehran’s intensive efforts to influence and even control Iraqi domestic politics and policymaking will certainly not help matters.

Iran and its local clients are now much more firmly associated with the corrupt, dysfunctional political order being roundly rejected in both societies and also with the crude, sectarian, and, in the case of Iraq, brutal measures being employed to maintain them. The campaign of repression has the makings of a disastrous turning point in attitudes toward Iran among large parts of the Lebanese and Iraqi populations, including many Shias, that may linger for years. Iran’s influence in both societies seems far more fragile than has been assumed in recent years and Iran was indeed overextended and vulnerable in these Arab countries.

Iran’s Worries in Syria and at Home

Iran’s influence in Syria had appeared to be far less threatened, given its strong alliance with the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and powerful presence on the ground in much of the country. However, recent developments in northern Syria have raised the prospect that other parties, including Russia, Turkey, the United States, and even the Assad regime, might agree to postconflict or deconfliction arrangements that would squeeze Iran out of positions of influence insofar as possible. Russia and the Syrian government still remain dependent on Iran and Hezbollah on the ground in some areas and Iran is continuing to try to build a military infrastructure in key parts of Syria. However, as the postconflict scenario begins to take shape, marginalizing Iran’s role appears to be developing as a common interest for Moscow, Washington, Ankara, and, to the extent possible, Damascus. And Israel has repeatedly demonstrated that it has enforceable redlines about Iranian and Hezbollah activity in Syria and, more recently, parts of Iraq as well. Again, Iran appears to be overextended, including in Syria.

Finally, anti-government protests that have caught fire in Iran in recent days underline the political difficulties besetting the regime. Ostensibly sparked by a 50% gasoline price hike and the imposition of rationing as a result of sanctions, the protests, which have spread to a hundred Iranian towns and cities and resulted in dozens of deaths, actually reflect much more deep-seated discontent. While the protests in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon differ greatly, the Iranian protests certainly represent a further intensification of the woes of the regime and are the most direct part of the political crisis facing it. The clearest indication of how threatened the regime feels by these protests is the countrywide Internet blackout imposed on November 17.

Opportunities for Regional De-escalations

This is the context in which Saudi Arabia seems to be exploring diplomatic options for resolving regional disputes. In each case, the conflicts themselves have generated sufficient incentives to pursue compromise. Yet the regional context in which Iran appears to be struggling is a key factor linking all three initiatives.

The Riyadh agreement Saudi Arabia brokered between the Yemeni government and the pro-secession Southern Transitional Council reflects Saudi interests in stabilizing the situation and extricating itself from what has become a quagmire in Yemen. The UAE has already taken the lead in disengaging, and the agreement demonstrates a Saudi desire to stabilize the situation in the south, presumably as a prelude to further disengagement. Reports that Saudi Arabia has begun a quiet dialogue with the Houthis in recent months add to the sense that Riyadh is looking for a way out of Yemen and may be prepared to compromise with the Houthis, particularly if the Saudis feel Iran is not in a position to take advantage of the postconflict situation in Yemen.

Much the same applies to the boycott of Qatar, which began in June 2017. This, too, is a stalemate, although the costs to Qatar have been more serious than to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt. However, Doha has developed effective workarounds that have allowed it to endure the boycott as a “new normal,” with continued U.S. support and the help of Turkey and Iran. Whatever the boycott was supposed to accomplish, therefore, has either been secured or is not going to be secured by these means. There is little cachet in continuing for any of the parties, especially given that, again, Iran is hardly in a position to take advantage of diplomatic openings among Gulf Arab countries and Turkey appears highly focused on events in northern Syria.

The most significant gesture toward a reconciliation within the Gulf Corporation Council is the announcement that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain will be participating in the Gulf Cup in Doha beginning November 26. Given that restrictions on travel and trade are at the heart of the boycott, if this participation involves significant levels of travel and trade it could signal a significant easing of the boycott, which in any event was never total. It did not extend to restrictions on shipments of and trade in energy, nor to GCC military cooperation. Apart from continuous U.S. pressure to heal the rift within the GCC and since little more is likely to be secured by the continuation of the boycott, a key argument for reconciling would be that Iran has been a major beneficiary of the split and, to take advantage of Tehran’s woes, Gulf Arab countries ought to be as united as possible.

Finally, there are indications that Saudi Arabia, like the UAE before it, has for several months been cautiously exploring the potential for dialogue with Iran, albeit indirectly. Riyadh never wanted its own or a U.S. war with Iran. The “maximum resistance” campaign, especially the attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure, has served as a potent reminder of how much all parties stand to lose from a conflict in the Gulf. Given that the most important reservations holding Riyadh back from a serious dialogue with Tehran in recent years now appear to be significantly attenuated, there is all the more reason for Saudi interest in talks.

Indeed, the deeper question is whether reticence will now have transferred to hard-liners in Tehran, who may suddenly be the ones feeling that the time is not right for a dialogue with regional rivals. However, Iran’s political leaders, including President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, continue to advocate for regional and international dialogue, including via their new Hormuz Peace Endeavor (HOPE), an ambitious program for regional security and cooperation. Whether Iran’s elected leaders are sincere in this agenda, and, more importantly, whether it also has the backing of Iran’s far more powerful unelected leadership in the Supreme National Security Council and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as well as, of course, the supreme leader, remains to be determined. And, of course, the goal of the initiative, as Iran acknowledges, is splitting Washington’s Gulf Arab allies from the United States and securing the removal of U.S. military forces from the region altogether.

Yet, assuming it’s not merely a stunt, the HOPE initiative must be viewed as an opening bid made under increasingly difficult circumstances. There are ample grounds for mutual suspicion, but also clearly a need on all sides to move away from the atmosphere of the zero-sum confrontation that has prevailed in recent years. The stalemate between “maximum pressure” and “maximum resistance” illustrates the dangers of confrontation for both Iran and Saudi Arabia and spurred an evident interest in dialogue on both sides. That, combined with the strategic and political crisis facing Iran, may make Riyadh more willing to engage in dialogue about long-term regional arrangements and Tehran more willing to accept reasonable limitations on its ambitions in the Arab world and strategies that involve destabilizing neighboring states.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-20/israeli-settlements-u-s-reversal-contrary-to-international-law?srnd=opinion

The Trump administration signals to the world that it’s fine to gain territory through war.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent announcement that the U.S. no longer views Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem as illegal isn’t just a disaster for peace. It’s an all-out assault on international law and human rights.

What usually gets forgotten is when and why the international community outlawed settling occupied territories in the first place.

The prohibition comes from the Fourth Geneva Convention, adopted in the aftermath of World War II, which for the first time outlined the rights of civilians during war. According to Article 49, paragraph six of the convention, an occupying power “shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

Subsequent UN Security Council resolutions and international court rulings leave no doubt that Israel is the occupying power in the territories that came under its control in 1967. Indeed, when justifying its military activities in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel frequently cites the rights of occupying forces, especially as defined by Article 43 of the Hague Regulations.

But the introduction over decades of more than 700,000 Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank is a clear-cut and massive violation of Article 49.

Some Israelis have tried to argue that Article 49 only prohibits the forced transfer of civilians into such settlements. However, as the definitive 1958 commentary on the convention by the International Committee of the Red Cross makes clear, the Article does not refer to compulsory transfers but any transfers at all. According to the ICRC:

It is intended to prevent a practice adopted during the Second World War by certain Powers, which transferred portions of their own population to occupied territory for political and racial reasons or in order, as they claimed, to colonize those territories. Such transfers worsened the economic situation of the native population and endangered their separate existence as a race.

In other words, people living under military occupation have individual and collective human rights not to be colonized, not to have their land taken away from them, and not to have civilian settlers from the occupying power impose themselves by force.

This is precisely what Israel has done in the occupied territories, and it is not primarily a political problem or a peace-process conundrum. It’s a serious human rights abuse.

The Israeli government has understood this all along. In March 1968, Theodor Meron, then the legal adviser to the Israeli foreign ministry, authored an internal memo on the legality of settlements. He noted that, because the “prohibition” on settling occupied territories “is categorical and not conditional upon the motives,” settlement could only be “carried out by military and not civilian entities” and must be “temporary.”

Despite this clear understanding, Israel began settling the occupied territories in the late 1960s and continues to expand its military and civilian matrix of control. Even the era of the peace process didn’t slow down this inexorable colonization.

Since 1978 at the very latest, the U.S. government has been clear that Israeli settlement is inconsistent with international law. Pompeo’s claim to be overturning a last-minute decision made at the end of Barack Obama’s second term is disingenuous. And while the State Department claims to have a 40-page legal opinion justifying this policy shift, it hasn’t been made public and couldn’t possibly be persuasive.

As usual with the Trump administration, the motivations here are nakedly political. They are trying to help save the political fortunes of their ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and help keep him out of prison. And it’s another sop to Donald Trump’s most ardent domestic fan base: the pro-occupation and pro-settlement Christian evangelical right.

Pompeo, for his part, insists he has only “recognized the reality on the ground,” since he believes Israel shouldn’t have to withdraw from settlements or other parts of the occupied territories if it doesn’t want to.

But his announcement will have consequences far beyond the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the fate of the seemingly doomed two-state solution, or prospects for wide-scale Israeli annexations. It even goes beyond the question of Palestinian human rights.

Its message to the world is clear: colonizing occupied territories is no longer forbidden. By inviting predatory powers to create new “realities” to be “recognized,” this blunder guts another key aspect of international law: the prohibition against acquiring territory by war.

Apparently, now all you need do is seize an area, hold it for long enough, colonize it thoroughly, and then demand international endorsement. The last obstacles to predatory territorial expansion and conquest have just been jettisoned in favor of “realities on the ground.”

Welcome to the jungle.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/why-the-demonstrators-in-iran-may-drive-the-regime-to-the-negotiating-table-1.939626

US and its Gulf allies have a window of opportunity to get a deal with a country that finds itself mired in economic, political and strategic problems

When Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018 and imposed new sanctions against its regime, he said the objective was to secure a better agreement. That was always an ambitious goal but, thanks to the strategic and political crisis facing Tehran due to recent ongoing protests in the region, Washington and its Gulf allies may have an opportunity to secure a new understanding with Tehran.

US-led sanctions have no doubt had a hugely adverse effect on Iran’s economy. Its petroleum exports are at a fraction of their previous levels. Few multinational corporations are willing to do business with Iran and risk the wrath of the US treasury department. In their attempts to salvage the nuclear agreement, European governments have sought to find a special purpose vehicle to bypass sanctions, largely to no avail. As a result, the country is experiencing a severe financial crisis, projected to contract the economy by 9.6 per cent this year, with only Venezuela and Syria having suffered worse declines.

However, sanctions against a country can make its citizens even more dependent on the regime that runs it, and encourage competing factions within it to circle the wagons against outside pressure, often by rallying around hardliners. This was certainly Tehran’s initial response, with the regime deciding its best option was to endure the fallout of the sanctions – just as North Korea, Cuba and Iraq under Saddam Hussein have done in the past. And with Iran determined to develop its sizeable internal market, economic warfare alone was unlikely to radically alter its calculations and return it to the negotiating table.

As I argued at the outset of the sanctions, for Tehran to change its behaviour it would have to experience significant strategic and political setbacks in the region in addition to economic distress. Only such pressure could press regime leaders to try to protect as many of their assets as possible through a new understanding rather than facing continuing losses. Yet the Trump administration has no appetite for the kind of bold steps in regional battlegrounds like Syria and Iraq that would have generated such alarm in Iran. Attacks on pro-Iranian militia groups in Iraq, unclaimed but widely attributed to Israel, are only one example of the kind of pushback, which should also include political and soft-power engagement, that can undermine Iran’s destabilising encroachments in the Arab world.

In response to Washington’s “maximum pressure” policy, Tehran also initiated a campaign of “maximum resistance” which included low-intensity military attacks on Gulf– and US-related interests. It carefully calibrated and steadily increased the intensity of these attacks in an effort, thus far without success, to provoke a military response from the US and its Arab allies and generate a diplomatic crisis. Tehran knows it has no leverage with Washington but hoped that a military crisis could prompt European, Arab and Asian powers to convince the United States to ease the sanctions in order to restore calm, thereby loosening the financial noose. Meanwhile, Tehran has also gradually resumed its nuclear enrichment activities, losing the sympathy of European states as well as multilateral agencies. All this produced an impasse that persisted for months.

However, a major strategic and political crisis for the Iranian regime has suddenly erupted on the streets of Lebanon and Iraq. Protests in both countries are driven largely by socioeconomic and governance issues, with constituencies lashing out at their own nominal leaders, only some of whom are beholden to Tehran. But in both countries, demonstrators have become increasingly convinced that their grievances cannot be addressed by the existing political systems.

The problem for Iran is that it has nothing to gain and everything to lose from major changes to the political power structures in Iraq and Lebanon. Consequently, the regime and its proxies in both countries have dropped any pretence of sympathy for the protests and relied on threats, intimidation and deadly force – particularly in Iraq – against unarmed civilians to try to crush the uprisings.

As demonstrations continue undaunted, Tehran is increasingly being associated with the corrupt establishments and the brutality being deployed to defend them. So even if Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Popular Mobilisation Forces in Iraq are able to avoid the structural reforms that would inevitably weaken their respective positions, anger and resentment towards the Iranian regime among populations in those countries could lead to a decline in its influence in the long run.

To make matters worse for Tehran, protests have erupted in Iran itself. Demonstrations have rocked more than 100 cities, with the public rejecting a 50 per cent hike in petrol prices – no doubt a symptom of more deep-seated dissatisfaction among ordinary Iranians. The uprising is partly driven by economic pain from sanctions and partly by long-standing discontent with theocratic despotism. In all likelihood, it has also been partly inspired by the protests in Iraq and Lebanon.

While regime change in Tehran remains unlikely, prolonged unrest across the region has produced precisely the kind of strategic crisis that sanctions alone could not achieve. Sanctions might have been a factor in the uprisings – particularly in Iran – but they are not the fundamental cause. Tehran is over-extended and the ruthless and corrupt orders it has propped up at home and abroad are buckling under the weight of their own contradictions.

The regime’s response in all three cases has included repression, threats and force while painting demonstrators as thugs controlled by nefarious foreign manipulators. And in Iran its alarm is demonstrated by a total shutdown of the internet – a drastic step that borders on panic. It is likely to be similarly obdurate and defiant in its diplomatic reaction as well. However, it now faces precisely the combination of economic misery and strategic and political crisis that might induce it to talk seriously to its adversaries. It must, after all, staunch the bleeding and prevent even more serious damage.

Purposive negotiations are, and should be, the strategic choice in such circumstances. The US and Arab countries should use whatever positive and negative inducements they can to encourage Iran to reach this conclusion. Given the regional strategic crisis Tehran faces, it might at last be willing to seriously discuss not only its nuclear and missile programmes but also its support for armed militias and terrorist groups in the Middle East.

Tehran increasingly needs a new deal, which means that the negotiations that Mr Trump called for 18 months ago no longer seem implausible.

Senior officials are not only divided by internal rifts but if or how to implement stated policy.

All governments are divided but the Trump administration has developed a set of schisms unlike any of its predecessors.

The House of Representatives’ investigation into the Ukraine scandal has revealed a government that is divided, not only in familiar, virtually inevitable ways but along unprecedented lines that have often rendered both policy and implementation contradictory.

Obviously, there will be a vast division between any White House and the Congress, particularly when some or all of it is controlled by the opposition. And there is usually considerable space between political appointees at the top of the policymaking structure in the executive branch and career public servants who mostly implement those policies. Add to that ideological factions and institutional and personal rivalries.

There has never been a government anywhere that didn’t have such internal rifts and consequent infighting. Still, the current US administration is not only split along these familiar lines but also between senior politically appointed officials who are trying to implement stated policy versus those following President Donald Trump’s personal agenda and most capricious impulses.

That is not the same as any of the traditional schisms. It is the difference between officials who take policy seriously and those who are almost entirely interested in Mr Trump’s personal political agenda.

The Ukraine policy is the most dramatic example but not the only one.

In that case, now mostly former officials such as Mr Trump’s two ambassadors to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovich and William Taylor, as well as national security adviser John Bolton and National Security Council staffers such as Fiona Hill and Alexander Vindman, among many others, struggled to implement long-standing and stated Ukraine policy. That included promoting an anti-corruption campaign in co-ordination with various European countries and others, and support for Ukraine’s resistance to a separatist push by pro-Russian insurgents.

As they sought to implement these policies according to the law, these officials found themselves confronting another group, led not by a rival official but the president’s private, and hence unaccountable, lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

He was directing a troika consisting of Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker, energy secretary Rick Perry and European Union special envoy Gordon Sondland in an effort to pressure the Ukrainian government to initiate or at least publicly announce a criminal investigation into a company associated with US presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son and another into a long-debunked conspiracy theory suggesting that foreign interference in the 2016 election came from Ukraine on behalf of Democrats rather than, as all evidence indicates, Russia on Mr Trump’s behalf.

To secure Mr Trump’s political agenda, this faction was willing to sacrifice stated policy and ignore or circumvent the law. After initially denying it, Mr Sondland now acknowledges he told Ukrainian leaders that a White House meeting with Mr Trump and $400 million in emergency military aid would not be forthcoming without such an announcement.

It’s easy to see why Mr Trump wanted that. However, insisting on a politically motivated criminal investigation runs directly counter to decades of US anti-corruption policy, which is why none of this was ever shared with the international Ukraine anti-corruption coalition. Moreover, Congress had appropriated the military aid pursuant to Ukraine’s obviously dire needs and the legal requirement to transfer it was consistent with policy to support Ukraine.

So the Giuliani faction was pursuing a political agenda directly at odds with the stated policy of the Trump administration. Considerable outrage when these activities became widely known within the government prompted the whistleblower complaint that initiated the House investigation and yielded damning testimony establishing all of this.

The law and policy faction, meanwhile, sought to mitigate political pressure on Kiev as much as possible and find a way to provide the military assistance anyway. Armed with a legal finding that the appropriated aid could not be lawfully withheld or even delayed without a set of formal actions that were never taken, this group effecively went behind the back of White House acting chief of staff and former OMB director Mick Mulvaney, who was continuing to enforce a hold ordered by Mr Trump, and released at least $141 million to Ukraine.

So what was the Ukraine policy anyway?

When Mr Giuliani and his three amigos were in action, or Mr Trump was on the phone to Kiev, apparently it was to withhold all forms of co-operation pending political favours. Otherwise, it was to continue to strongly back Ukraine against Russia and support genuine anti-corruption efforts.

Similar tussles over immigration policy have riven various agencies in the department of Homeland Security, such as immigration and customs enforcement, and customs and border protection. An extraordinary number of senior officials have been ousted because they resisted draconian anti-migration measures that are politically useful to Mr Trump but are contrary to stated policies and in many cases probably unlawful.

Family separation, long-term detention of children, denial of the right to apply for asylum, summary deportations and other harsh policies are still being fought over between officials seeking to implement stated policy and follow the law versus those focused on advancing Mr Trump’s nativist political agenda.

Mr Trump has reportedly even suggested obviously unlawful measures such as shooting at the legs of would-be migrants and summarily seizing privately owned land for his border wall and promised pardons to officials who encounter legal problems.

There are many other areas of foreign and domestic policy where similar extraordinary divisions have emerged. The ongoing struggle over the US role in Syria and disputes over North Korea are two other obvious examples among many.

All this is essentially new.

It may be unique to the Trump administration because until now there has never been a US president who consistently and strongly privileged a personal political agenda over stated policies. But it leaves everyone at home and abroad wondering what agenda at any given moment this administration is really pursuing and what it might do next.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/iraq-and-syria-have-perplexed-a-succession-of-american-leaders-1.933141

President Donald Trump’s confused foreign policy has reinforced the idea that the US is an unreliable and faithless ally.

For the past 15 years, a pervasive sense has grown, both at home and abroad, that US foreign policy has been lacking a clear direction, consensus and will. Nowhere has that been more evident than in Iraq and Syria, not coincidentally the epicentre of ISIS’s so-called caliphate. And never has it been clearer than in recent weeks.

The killing of ISIS leader and self-styled caliph Abu Bakr al Baghdadi was, or should have been, a major victory for Washington. Al Baghdadi was one of the most vicious terrorists of all time and led a singularly dangerous mob. His extremist followers not only engaged in rampant murder, torture, sexual enslavement of women and numerous other crimes; they were also the first Sunni Jihadist terror group to establish a de facto mini-state.

Al Baghdadi’s death ought to have been met with a sense of achievement and a determination to continue combating extremism. That wasn’t what happened.

US President Donald Trump certainly claimed it as a victory. In contrast to the sombre announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden by his predecessor Barack Obama, Mr Trump even claimed Al Baghdadi was “screaming, crying and whimpering” before blowing himself up – although senior officials at the Pentagon have not corroborated his version of events.

Mr Trump’s bluster notwithstanding, in tracking and finding Al Baghdadi, and defeating ISIS, the US relied on the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which sacrificed 11,000 lives in the struggle against the terrorists.

Their reward came last month when Mr Trump announced, after a telephone conversation with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that all US forces would be leaving Syria. That effectively abandoned the Syrian Kurds to their Turkish antagonists and forced them into a de facto surrender to the Bashar Al Assad dictatorship.

But within days, the US then announced that several hundred elite troops would remain at the Al Tanf garrison, which effectively blocks Iran from controlling the main Baghdad-Damascus highway. Mr Trump’s security advisers appear to have eventually convinced him, under the rubric of seizing oilfields in Deir Ezzor province, to retain most US forces in Syria. It means the number of ground forces in Syria will be barely unchanged from the 1,000 soldiers he promised to withdraw.

The US, of course, cannot sell Syria’s oil and the fields are largely non-functional. The oil is plainly a ruse that Mr Trump’s advisers used to get him to agree to keep a substantial number of US troops across different parts of eastern Syria, in language he understands – namely, that oil equals money.

But US forces strategically placed around oilfields could easily double as means of containing Iranian influence in crucial strategic areas, especially given the emerging de facto co-ordination with Turkey and Russia to achieve exactly that.

So now Washington plans to retain at least 900 troops in Syria, only slightly less than before, but with even more tanks and armour.

In effect, the US has pointlessly reinforced the idea that it is an unreliable and faithless ally that has lost its will to fight. Mr Trump appears confused in his decision-making and easily manipulated by both foreign leaders and his own staff. Meanwhile whatever burdens and risk are attached to the Syria mission remain unchanged.

This is the strategic equivalent of paying retail. Twice.

Another unresolved question was what to do with the US forces that were supposed to leave Syria. The initial idea was to send them to Iraq. But this was publicly announced before Washington quietly secured an agreement with the Iraqis, thus ensuring that Baghdad could not agree to it.

It is the opposite of statecraft to announce the redeployment of troops from highly strategic areas and only then try to figure out where they can go.

Iraq and Syria seem to have the ability to scramble the brains of a wide variety of American leaders. In 2003, the George W Bush administration charged into an invasion of Iraq that undoubtedly ranks as one of the greatest foreign policy blunders in US history. Mr Obama oversaw a weak, inconsistent and often inexplicable policy in Syria that demanded the removal of Mr Al Assad but refused to do anything serious to secure it. It frequently backfired.

Now, for the fourth time in less than three years, Mr Trump has announced the removal of all US forces from Syria, only to be forced yet again to recant.

No power, no matter how mighty, can prevail or handle relatively manageable problems, even against far weaker antagonists, if it cannot agree – and therefore does not know – what it wants.

The fundamental disagreement in the Trump administration over Syria, with the president trying to get out and his senior officials manoeuvring to stay in, is a textbook example of policy confusion.

The never-ending fiasco of US Syria policy, unfortunately, is a synecdoche for a broader failure of American global policy and strategy.

Republicans are now deeply divided between isolationists like the president and internationalists like most of his senior officials. The same factions are at odds in the Democratic Party.

The political and foreign policy establishment in the US has strikingly failed, since the end of the Cold War, to convince ordinary Americans how and why they benefit from global engagement and leadership. A large and growing number agree with Mr Trump that, without the Soviet menace, the whole thing is an intolerable burden.

This disastrous misunderstanding was produced by epic blunders like the Iraq invasion, combined with pervasive stereotypes that cast the rest of the planet as feeding parasitically off a rich and altruistic US. Mr Trump’s rhetoric plays to this notion.

What the ongoing debacle in Syria demonstrates is that American internationalists, both Republicans and Democrats, must either make the case much more effectively to the public about the benefits and importance to them of US international engagement or accept that, no matter how misguided it is, Mr Trump’s neo-isolationism will continue to win by default.