Gaza is back in flames, and U.S. policy is a big reason why.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-10/kushner-s-assault-on-mideast-peace

With Hamas and Israel on the brink of yet another war, Gaza is boiling over, as all intelligent observers have predicted for months.

Along with another wave of senseless, pointless death and destruction, this latest round of violence is a perfect apotheosis of the atrocious policies from Jared Kushner and the Donald Trump administration on all matters involving Israel and the Palestinians.

It’s hard to remember now, with hundreds of Hamas rockets fired at Southern Israel and hundreds of Israeli air strikes in Gaza, but the administration’s peace efforts began with great fanfare. Trump talked confidently about “the deal of the century” and said there’s “no reason whatsoever” there’s no peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

To signal the depth of his commitment, he appointed his son-in-law, Kushner, to spearhead the efforts, and made Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas one of his first guests to his White House. In April and May of 2017, Palestinian leaders were positively giddy at the prospect of having their issue suddenly resurrected by this least likely of benefactors.

They were, as many of us warned at the time, profoundly mistaken.

They quickly got the idea, as Trump dropped all references to a two-state solution, ratcheted down U.S. opposition to Israeli settlement activity, and eliminated any mention of the word “occupation.”

And then came the bombshell. Trump recognized Jerusalem, without qualification, as Israel’s capital, and moved the U.S. Embassy there. Kushner reportedly supported all these decisions.

The administration kidded itself that the Palestinians would just get over it or that Arab countries like Saudi Arabia would somehow be willing or able to force Palestinians to take part in negotiations under completely unacceptable terms.

Kushner and his team have no background in diplomacy or Middle East issues, except being ardent supporters of Israel, but did spend “10 months of educating themselves on the complexities” of the issues. “We don’t want a history lesson,” Kushner said last summer. “We’ve read enough books”

Team Trump didn’t seem to realize until it was too late that there was no way for Palestinians to return to negotiations with Jerusalem, as the president put it, “taken off the table.”

Kushner persisted in talking up his vague plan even though was by then no way to release it without doing enormous harm. Moreover, there’s every indication he’s really talking about “economic peace,” the absurd idea that Palestinians will basically drop their quest to end the occupation and establish their own state if they are given enough money.

Early this year, when it became clear that Palestinians weren’t going to roll over and that Abbas wouldn’t and couldn’t get involved in negotiations under these circumstances, Kushner and company turned their attention to Gaza as “Plan B.”

That made a certain degree of sense. No matter how grotesquely the Trump administration has sabotaged its own stated intentions, and delivered the greatest blows to peace since the Oslo process began, the one thing everyone could agree on was the need for urgent humanitarian relief in Gaza.

Israeli officials bluntly predicted Gaza was a ticking time bomb of human misery. Egypt has been urgently seeking a way forward since last summer. Even Hamas is desperate for a solution.

The problem is that nobody wants to bring in aid in a way that rewards and bolsters Hamas. The obvious answer is to strengthen and return the Palestinian Authority to Gaza. But Abbas won’t agree to take responsibility for Gaza unless Hamas gives up its weapons. And Hamas won’t do that.

Egypt tried to cut this Gordian knot for months last year by bringing the PA back into Gaza but got nowhere. This year, another effort has been led by the United Nations’ special envoy, Nickolay Mladenov. But he’s encountered the same conundrum. You can get around Hamas, but only through the PA. Yet Abbas regards the whole thing as a trap.

The answer would be to reward and reassure him that the international community has his back and won’t let him be suckered into a political disaster in which he accepts all the responsibility for Gaza with none of the necessary resources and with Hamas retaining all the military power, complete with its own foreign and defense policy.

That’s where Kushner again looms as a major problem. He and his team have issued a series of articles and interviews blaming everything on Hamas. Nothing they’re saying isn’t true. But to listen to them, you’d never know there was an Israeli occupation or blockade, or any of the other key factors that have so strongly contributed to the misery in Gaza, the divisions among Palestinians, and every other element of the present disaster.

Not content with that, Trump administration officials have trashed and denounced the PA leadership as well, further alienating Palestinians of every description. They’ve torched every bridge to Palestine with extreme precision.

The administration has also slashed U.S. aid to the UN agency that aids Palestinian refugees, who make up at least 70 percent of the Gaza population, adding another catastrophe on top of the ongoing disaster.

And just to put the cherry on top of this hot fudge sundae of howlers, it’s been revealed that of late Kushner has been secretly pushing for “an honest and sincere effort to disrupt” UN efforts and pressing Jordan to strip the 2 million Palestinians living in there of refugee status so that they can no longer receive any UN humanitarian support.

His goal is obvious: to take the refugee issue, like Jerusalem, off the table once and for all, leaving the Palestinians with less leverage than ever, softening them up to accept his version of economic peace without political freedom or human rights.

While Kushner has been busy plotting against refugees, the situation in Gaza has steadily deteriorated. More than 100 largely unarmed Palestinians were shot by Israeli forces at the border. Gazans floated kites and balloons loaded with incendiaries over the Israeli border. Israeli soldiers were ambushed. It all led inexorably to this latest exchange of rocket and air attacks.

Sure, Jared Kushner didn’t create this mess. So, how can I lay it at his feet?

Because the only country that’s been in a real position to make any difference is the U.S. and, under his watch, more harm has been done to the prospects for peace and stability than in the previous two decades of blunders, bias and neglect from Washington.

In his emails about the UN relief agency, Kushner mused, “Sometimes you have to strategically risk breaking things.” He’s done that brilliantly, smashing both U.S. credibility and any hope for lasting peace into as many shards of glass as a window in southern Israel or an apartment in Gaza City.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/how-scaremongering-and-a-fictional-narrative-are-keeping-migrant-parents-and-children-apart-1.743367

The separation of migrant children from their parents is a massive and historically significant stress test for the American political soul and system.

At the heart of the issue is race and Donald Trump’s determination to weaponise white Christian tribal anger about the growing size and influence of minority groups. He was elected on a hardline anti-immigrant platform based on the stereotyping of Mexicans as “drug dealers and rapists” and Muslims as “terrorists”.

Mr Trump clearly believes that his principal commitment to the voters, many of them former Democrats, is an anti-immigrant crackdown. He is reportedly upset that he has, as yet, made little progress on this.

The separation controversy stems from his April zero tolerance order that anyone crossing the border without permission must be jailed and prosecuted, even though that is usually a misdemeanour.

Because children could not be jailed and parents had to spend weeks, if not months, waiting to be prosecuted, families were separated.

Mr Trump was apparently happy with that, especially because he viewed ripping children from their parents as an effective deterrent to migration. He seems taken aback the rest of the country has been less thrilled.

But every time Mr Trump has tried to enact xenophobic immigration policies, it has backfired spectacularly.

First there was the ban on travellers from mostly Muslim countries, which has been repeatedly rejected by courts and caused tremendous chaos at airports when it was first launched shortly after he took office.

Then came his efforts to pressure Democrats on immigration policy by threatening the status of the young adults known as “dreamers”, who were brought to the country as small children.

Now he has deployed the deliberate traumatisation of migrant children, hundreds of whom are now apparently missing within the labyrinthine system.

The chaos intensified after Mr Trump signed a fuzzy executive order against separating families last Thursday.

The Justice Department insists it requires the long-term jailing of entire families together and is getting the military to quickly build “temporary and austere” tent cities to house tens of thousands of migrants. US Customs and Border Protection, though, insists such plans are totally unworkable and because they involve children, probably illegal.

In all three cases, Mr Trump has bet that jingoism would prove a political winner while his opponents believed he went too far.

Whether he ultimately has to back down on family separation and imprisonment will reveal much about the condition of the American political soul.

If Mr Trump is right, the majority have become hysterically xenophobic.

If they’re not, he will continue to be pushed back on zero tolerance and child separation and will suffer a significant repudiation at the polls in the November midterm elections.

Even US allies who think they don’t care about the condition of the American soul need to pay close attention to both the process and the outcome of this unfolding fiasco.

First, white nationalist impulses strongly correlate with neo-isolationist foreign policy attitudes.

That’s potentially bad news for America’s allies, including in the Gulf, who need US foreign policy to remain committed to the international goals and concomitant alliances and military and diplomatic commitments that ensure their security.

The more Mr Trump is pulled in the white nationalist direction, the less Washington will feel bound by obligations to allies, who become easily dispensable, as Japan and South Korea may be discovering.

It’s also much harder for clear-eyed policy to overrule emotive politics when all relationships become zero-sum and bound in identity.

Secondly, it’s no secret the Trump administration has an uneasy relationship with objective reality.

Indeed, Mr Trump has managed to separate what he presents as a deeper, emotive truth — conveyed through the alternate realities he conjures in his largely fictional narratives — entirely from the verifiable facts, which he denies and dismisses if they contradict him.

But the American political system is premised on compromise based on institutional checks and balances, and debates between different power centres.

There’s always a gap between interpretations and some shading of the truth. That’s normal politics. But the Trump administration has introduced – and in the immigration debate considerably sharpened – the deployment of entirely fictiional alternate realities into the American conversation.

Mr Trump insisted he was forced to separate families by laws that did not exist and that he could not resolve the issue by executive order, as he then claimed to do. His officials bizarrely maintained there was no such policy at all.

The US president also invoked an immigrant crimewave in both the United States and Germany that is entirely fictitious. To reinforce that widely held misapprehension, he even held a press conference with the parents of those killed by undocumented migrants, although every study shows native-born US citizens are far more likely to commit crimes than immigrants of any kind.

Such utter fabrications made any serious discussion of both the underlying realities and policy options practically impossible.

One cannot debate someone who insists they’re bound by imaginary laws and who makes up and says anything they like to suit their immediate purposes, with no compunction or reference whatsoever to underlying reality.

The US is a status quo power. It needs to be predictable and stabilising. It cannot succeed in its international mission with impetuous, reckless, chaotic decision-making. And the American system cannot function with its discourse completely untethered to fact and reality.

Even US allies who are happy with some aspects of the Trump foreign policy need to ponder if this is a transient moment or a new American normal – and fervently hope it’s the former.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/the-white-house-iftar-with-no-muslim-americans-perfectly-encapsulated-trump-s-attitude-to-islam-1.740747

The June 6 White House iftar, and especially the guest list, perfectly encapsulated Donald Trump’s relationship with Islam and Muslims.

Hosting an annual Ramadan dinner at the White House was started by then first lady Hillary Clinton in 1996 and repeated every year until 2017. Then Mr Trump abandoned the budding tradition. That didn’t surprise anyone, given his full-throated hostility towards Islam and Muslims during the presidential campaign.

This year he revived the practice but with an extremely telling twist. There were many diplomats from Muslim majority countries at his first iftar since taking office but no identifiable Muslim Americans, apparently not even his few but extant Muslim supporters.

This illustrates Mr Trump’s attitude towards Muslims perfectly. He doesn’t really care about religion. He has developed extremely friendly relations with many Muslim majority countries and doesn’t have any problem with Muslims “over there”.

His problem is with Muslims “over here”. Hence the travel ban; hence the absence of even his own Muslim supporters at the White House iftar; hence all his reckless rhetoric painting Muslim communities in the West as terrorist threats and promoting fear and hatred of Muslims in the United States. And hence the vitriolic Islamophobes populating his administration.

Mr Trump improbably ascended to the presidency, not based on a rational programme but on raw, visceral emotions. His appeal to his core supporters was never primarily about economic grievances, as many mistakenly think, or party affiliation, policies or any of the normal campaign issues of typical American politicians.

Instead, Mr Trump shrewdly and deliberately cast himself as the ethnic and religious champion of a powerful constituency that nonetheless feels profoundly threatened and embattled: white Christian Americans.

The cultural, demographic and religious transformation of US society in recent decades is striking. Many white Christian Americans feel they are literally losing control of a country that by rights “belongs” to them.

Beginning with the announcement of his candidacy in June 2015, Mr Trump’s pitch to the voters was mainly based on conspiracy theories, paranoia and xenophobia explicitly designed to appeal to the ethnic and religious fear and hatred of others by white, particularly Christian, Americans.

In that first campaign speech, he described Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and Muslims as “terrorists”, inaugurating his campaign against his two favourite targets, and inveighed against the rest of the world, particularly China, as swindling and mocking the United States.

It’s very cynical. While Mr Trump does have a long history of deeply held anti-black racism, his posture as the champion and saviour of the white Christian American is primarily calculated and opportunistic.

Hence Muslims “over here” are a threat and a problem and not to be invited to the White House while Muslims “over there” are potentially important friends and allies to be strategically embraced.

This dynamic also explains how the Republican Party has degenerated into little more than a personality cult, as Tennessee senator Bob Corker admitted this week, with support for Mr Trump being the only real litmus test. It’s why his supporters and party will follow him in virtually any twist and backflip imaginable on substantive issues.

Last week he effectively recognised North Korea as an equal nuclear power, heaping limitless praise on leader Kim Jong-un. Had any Democrat behaved like that, Republicans would be thundering “treason” and demanding impeachment. They often did so for infinitely less. Now there’s Republican unease but zero criticism.

White Christian fundamentalists generally love him, despite his embodiment of so many personal traits they supposedly despise. None of that’s a problem because he’s venerated as their tribal leader.

Mr Trump evidently greatly admires Mr Kim and other tyrants who utilise personality cults on a larger scale than he does, such as Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Rodrigo Duterte and Xi Jinping.

Conversely, he distrusts democratic leaders such as Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, as he made abundantly clear at the recent G7 meeting.

Mr Trump’s horrifying anti-immigrant policies, now including callously separating children from parents accused of misdemeanours like unlawful border crossings, or even because of lawful asylum requests, are the essence of his appeal.

Gratuitous cruelty to non-white Americans and would-be citizens, including children, isn’t an anomaly. It’s a feature, a selling point and wildly popular with his angry, ethnically fearful supporters.

Mr Trump’s personal history leaves no doubt that he’s profoundly bigoted against black people. And the overtly racist and xenophobic nature of his political appeal means he’s not likely to stop being hostile and cruel to Mesoamericans, Muslims and many other non-whites in the United States, particularly immigrants.

Yet that’s no reason why Muslim majority countries shouldn’t work closely with the Trump administration. Domestic politics aren’t key to foreign policy, especially for smaller states, which must be based on a clear-eyed reading of national interests. If Mr Trump’s policies align with those of Muslim countries, co-operation to secure those goals makes perfect sense.

But it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there were diplomats but no Muslim Americans at the White House iftar. It’s a precise reflection of Mr Trump’s approach to Islam and Muslims.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/trump-kim-summit-failed-diplomacy-could-mean-the-return-of-a-stand-off-with-renewed-threats-of-fire-and-fury-and-possibly-the-real-thing-1.738324

It’s disconcerting that we might be on the right road and headed in the correct direction but we’re not really sure that the drivers are sober – or even awake. US President Donald Trump will indeed meet North Korea’s Kim Jong-un in Singapore on June 12, as originally planned.

That’s great because less than a year ago, they were exchanging nasty personal insults and dire threats. A US-North Korean war would be horrendous and with North Korea developing long-range missiles and hydrogen bombs, it was becoming unnervingly plausible.

But any agreement will probably require one of the parties to back down significantly.

According to South Korea, both sides insist they want a complete, full and verifiable denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula. Yet they almost certainly imagine very different outcomes and both feel they are negotiating from positions of strength.
Mr Trump seems to genuinely think North Korea might relinquish its nuclear weapons in exchange for security and economic incentives. North Korea, as always, is hoping to divide Washington from Seoul and push the US out of the way so Pyongyang can eventually absorb the south.

Yet neither will be willing to make such concessions –unless they’ve completely changed their outlook.

The raison d’etre of the Kim dynasty completely rules out exchanging its nuclear deterrent for even the most generous economic and security incentives.

There are two Koreas and the northern regime was established with the explicit goal of uniting the country under the banner of its extreme and racist nationalism.

But since South Korea began completely outstripping the north in economic, technological and all other material terms in the 1970s, the Kim dynasty’s non-economic and even anti-economic ideology has further ossified.

North Koreans are generally well aware of the vastly superior living conditions in the south. The North Korean regime’s raison d’etre was never economic and that has grown more rather than less true over time.

According to its own narrative, North Korea constitutes a heavily militarised vanguard of a supposedly beleaguered Korean race for the purpose of defeating outsiders, especially the US and uniting Korea.

Evidence suggests many Koreans, including in the south, take that as a respectable and credible, if misguided, national mission.

North Korea’s modus operandi has always been primarily military. Having mastered the ultimate military technology, how could such a state give up its nuclear weapons?

The south might be the successful Korean material and economic model but the north supposedly embodies military power and genuine independence.

If Mr Kim agrees to genuinely forgo nuclear weapons, even in phased stages, for security and economics, he will be repudiating the world view and values of his father and grandfather and, indeed, the entire belief system of his country since its founding.

Nonetheless, an agreement is possible.

Mr Kim might disingenuously promise to relinquish nuclear weapons in the context of full denuclearisation without ever fulfilling that. And he might agree to genuinely stop any further thermonuclear and intercontinental missile development, essentially freezing North Korea’s nuclear weaponisation as it stands: on the brink of threatening the continental US but not actually doing so in a thorough or reliable manner.

In exchange, he would surely demand measures that would put Washington well on the way to full withdrawal from the Korean Peninsula, in the hope of an eventual reunification on his terms.

Such an agreement is hardly unimaginable. But there is no doubt which side would be effectively backing down. Through the upcoming summit itself, Mr Trump has already handed Mr Kim a major political and diplomatic victory in exchange for nothing.

When he agreed to a meeting as equals, Mr Trump almost certainly didn’t realise the huge unwarranted legitimisation he was handing “little rocket man”.

Any agreement, however it is packaged, that effectively leaves North Korea in possession of nuclear weapons and missiles that can threaten its neighbours, but not the continental US, will effectively be a US climbdown.

That is not necessarily a disaster though. Certainly, a deeply flawed agreement of that kind is preferable to a war and if it makes nuclear conflict less likely, then perhaps it should be welcomed. But if Pyongyang secures this and proclaims it a colossal victory, it wouldn’t be wrong.

Of course, if Mr Kim accepts real denuclearisation in exchange for mere security and economic pledges, the Pyongyang regime will not only have capitulated but effectively begun to dismantle itself.

A viable agreement regularising US-North Korea relations, ending the Korean War and permanently forestalling a nuclear confrontation in northeast Asia would not merely be welcome but one of the greatest triumphs of modern diplomacy. If Mr Trump can pull that off, he would deserve the Nobel Prize he craves.

But it’s more likely that we will eventually see a dreadfully flawed deal marketed with Mr Trump’s patented “truthful hyperbole”.

Worse still, failed diplomacy could mean the return of an increasingly intense stand-off with renewed threats of “fire and fury” – and possibly the real thing.

In these pages in February, I explained how Donald Trump had begun to de-institutionalise the US political system by attacking the credibility and functionality of civic and political institutions that can balance the authority of the presidency, check his power or threaten his position.

Since then, that process has greatly accelerated, though few Americans fully understand what’s going on. As demonstrated in numerous formerly democratic countries, by the time most people realise de-institutionalisation is even underway, incalculable and possibly irreversible damage is already done.

Mr Trump’s first and favourite target was the news media. Ironically, he’s largely a creature of the media, a self-generated caricature who, in that sense, is essentially a figment of his own imagination.

His career as a property developer largely collapsed when his casinos went bankrupt in the 1990s. But he re-emerged as a branding franchiser selling the Trump name and then made it big as the star and producer of the reality TV show The Apprentice.

For decades, Mr Trump used the media to exaggerate his persona. Using the false names John Barron and John Miller, he planted absurd falsehoods about his financial and romantic exploits in tabloids and gossip columns.

When he ran for the presidency, Mr Trump exploited his skill as a controversial figure to gain vast quantities of free advertising as news channels broadcast endless hours of his political rallies. Without the media, he might not have become president or, probably, at all noteworthy.

Once elected, he made the media his principal foil (Steve Bannon, his former White House strategist, called the press “the opposition party“), denouncing them with Stalinist vitriol as “the enemy of the American people“.

He doesn’t hide his motives. Veteran journalist Leslie Stahl reports that Mr Trump told her: “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”

That’s the logic of de-institutionalisation. Since the press can pose a threat, it must, as an institution, be discredited, lest journalists reveal inconvenient or embarrassing facts.

Mr Trump is not only at war with the press but with truth itself. As president, he has already told thousands of brazen lies, now averaging about eight falsehoods a day, according to the Washington Post, most recently falsely and angrily accusing journalists of inventing a source, who turned out to be his (real) senior Asia official, Matthew Pottinger.

The war against journalists was evident from the beginning of his presidency. But well into the second year, the prime targets now include the FBI, the intelligence community, including the CIA and the rest of the national security establishment.

For years, the American political right has contrived a paranoid fantasy that the country is secretly ruled by an all-powerful, unelected and unaccountable “deep state” cabal. Such “deep states” have indeed existed in some authoritarian countries, where shadowy military or intelligence officials, rather than formal or elected leaders, make key decisions.

But there is no “deep state” in Washington. There is a government with administrators and officials but the “deep state” is a conspiratorial delusion.

Mr Trump reportedly used to avoid this buzzword because he didn’t want to sound like “too much of a crank”. But now he has unleashed a series of tirades against the police and national security officials, labelling them a “CRIMINAL DEEP STATE” and accusing them, without evidence, of having embedded a “spy” in his presidential campaign for nefarious political purposes. He has dubbed this imaginary conspiracy against him “SPYGATE”.

Mr Trump has long purveyed wacky conspiracy theories and rose to prominence by championing the laughable claim that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. But now the scope is hugely expanding.

Last year he falsely accused Mr Obama of wiretapping him. Now he’s painting the entire law enforcement and national security establishment as a criminal gang determined to bring him down. There is no evidence whatsoever for these unprecedented accusations.

Mr Trump’s intention is again clear: he is pre-emptively discrediting the FBI, Department of Justice and special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating the last election, to undermine anything they might reveal. He has even accused Mueller’s investigators of “meddling” with the upcoming midterm elections, without saying how and, as always, with no evidence.

Just as the media must be demonised in case they write anything negative about him, law enforcement must be utterly discredited lest they discover any unlawful acts.

Undoubtedly Mr Trump thinks he’s just fending off enemies so his probable next target is alarmingly obvious. An independent judiciary is an enormous obstacle and threat to any leader. The courts must be next, as telegraphed by his highly partisan and personal recent pardons.

The logic of de-institutionalisation is simple. There’s only one legitimate authority: the leader. Therefore, independent, autonomous institutions, whether within the government or civil society, are the adversary. They must be stigmatised and de-fanged or destroyed, after which there is no system left, only a leader.

This terrifying process has wrecked democracy, accountability and rule of law in numerous countries. De-institutionalisation is just beginning in the United States and there’s no way of knowing how far it can go. But it really is happening.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/trump-s-art-of-the-deal-has-failed-him-in-negotiations-with-both-pyongyang-and-tehran-1.734107

On Thursday, as Donald Trump was cancelling his scheduled summit meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, the “deal of the day” on the White House gift shop website was a replica of the official summit commemorative coin at the bargain rate of $19.95.

Mr Trump’s letter to Mr Kim was a masterpiece of his own unique rhetoric, clearly dictated by the US president himself. Both the coin and the letter would be amusing if so many lives weren’t at stake.

It’s a considerable relief that Mr Trump isn’t going ahead with the meeting. When both sides are obviously unprepared for major negotiations and, especially, don’t share a common understanding of key terms, disaster can ensue.

At the July 2000 Camp David summit, for example, it emerged that Palestinians and Israelis were describing completely different outcomes when using the same phrase, “Palestinian state”. Palestinians anticipated a fully sovereign, contiguous UN member state in almost all the territories occupied in 1967, with its capital in East Jerusalem.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-25/iraq-s-election-the-u-s-lost-but-iran-lost-worse

The only thing that’s clear from Iraq’s May 12 election is who the voters rejected: Iran and the U.S. These two outside powers have dominated their affairs since 2003, and this is the latest sign that a growing number of Iraqis are eager to reassert their identity and independence.

Otherwise, things remain complicated. The biggest number of parliamentary seats, 54, went to a coalition headed by the populist Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. A coalition of pro-Iranian Shiite parties finished second with 47. The bloc led by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, the U.S. favorite, followed closely with 42.

It takes 165 votes to form a governing majority in parliament, and with large numbers of smaller ethnic, sectarian and regional groupings in play, months of jockeying for position are virtually inevitable.

This is compounded by the dreadful 2010 court ruling which, as I explained on these pages before the election, mandates that first crack at forming a new government does not automatically go to the electoral victor but, assuming nobody has an outright majority, to whoever can assemble the biggest post-election bloc.

Thus all the election did was establish a framework for the real politics, which are going on right now in many a smoke-filled room. It will take months. There are two obvious potential outcomes with substantial regional and international consequences.

Many Americans will remember Sadr from the post-invasion occupation, when he commanded a militia that attacked U.S. troops and committed atrocities against the Sunni population. At that time, Sadr was primarily seen as the pro-Iranian, Shiite sectarian force in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities, particularly in slum areas.

Over time, however, he has emerged as a type of politician Americans are now quite familiar with: mercurial, hyperbolic and idealistic, as well as protean and ever-changing. He has never reconciled with the U.S., but has had a bitter falling out with Iran.

He has successfully refashioned himself as a nationalist, with tremendous appeal in urban areas and, surprisingly, considerable support among Sunni Arabs. Even the three Iraqi communists who just got elected ran in his coalition.

He combines “Iraq first” rhetoric, which is simultaneously anti-American and anti-Iranian, with a fiery condemnation of existing politics and governance and demands for professionalism and technocrats in government, all the while lashing out at those he casts as political hacks or religious demagogues. This transformation has also allowed Sadr to rebuild ties with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab countries.

It’s hard to get to 165 parliamentary votes without Sadr’s team. That probably means trouble for the U.S. presence in the country, but also potentially the emergence of an Iraqi government that is surprisingly independent of Tehran’s influence and open to reintegrating Iraq into the Arab world.

Of course, it’s also possible that if all of the pro-Iranian forces in parliament — including the Fatah Alliance representing the sectarian Shiite militias — along with parties loyal to Abadi and former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, as well as smaller groups such as the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan band together, an overtly pro-Tehran government could emerge. Iran’s plenipotentiary to its Arab clients, General Qassem Soleimani of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has been reportedly barnstorming throughout Iraqto try to arrange precisely that.

Iran’s anxiety about the next Iraqi government is considerably intensified because of the U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal and many clear-cut signs from Washington’s regional allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia that Tehran will now face financial warfare and quite possibly a broader range of other pressures designed to cut its influence down to size.

Saudi Arabia has made considerable headway in recent years in weakening Iran’s grip on Iraq and re-establishing a Sunni and Gulf Arab political presence in the country. Riyadh would surely welcome a coalition led by or centered around Sadr and including Abadi’s bloc, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the secular National Alliance group headed by Ayad Allawi, a former interim prime minister.

There is no likelihood of an overtly anti-Iranian government in Baghdad. But there is a real possibility, and arguably even a likelihood, of a Sadr-led coalition that is non-Iranian in orientation. How stable that could be, and to what extent it could really contribute to the emergence of an increasingly independent Iraq not under the control of the U.S., Iran or the Arab countries, remains to be seen.

Ironically, whether the new government is basically pro-Iranian or not, almost all parties will eventually join it. Since 2005, no matter who ultimately formed a government, almost everyone eventually got on board. Iraq is one of the world’s most corrupt countries, and it’s hard to put your hand in the cookie jar if you’re standing outside the kitchen and sulking.

Sadr is best positioned to form the next government, but he can’t lead it directly because he did not sully himself with crude politicking and run for parliament himself. His high-minded rhetoric will make life difficult for anyone else who tries to live up to his lofty bombast.

Iran will do its best to block him and get its own clients back in power in Baghdad. But the election results have rendered that a long shot. No other country has accumulated as much influence in Iraq in recent years as Iran, so it’s well-positioned to play a long game. The converse is that no other country now has as much to lose in Iraq as Iran.

With Tehran bracing for serious financial and other blows from the U.S. and perhaps its allies, a significant loss of influence in Iraq would be a very bad precedent. The trajectory of Iraqi politics after the election will be an early and important indication of where Iran’s Middle Eastern regional clout may be headed.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-21/containing-iran-there-s-an-arab-plan-b

Plan A was the nuclear deal. That’s over. Now key Gulf states want the U.S. to flex more muscle.

President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal didn’t draw much international applause, but three U.S. allies in the Middle East — Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — warmly welcomed the move.

Israel had long said that the deal didn’t do enough to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, and Gulf Arab countries believed it gave Iran cover for an intensified campaign of destabilizing the Arab world. And they have plenty of ideas when it comes to drawing up a Plan B for a U.S.-led containment campaign against Iran.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE never shared President Barack Obama’s conviction that engagement and sanctions relief could moderate Iran’s revolutionary brashness, regional meddling and support for sectarian extremists.

So they’re pleased by Trump’s rhetorical attacks and reimposed sanctions against the Iranian regime, and they want the U.S. to foreclose any efforts by European countries that remain signatories to the nuclear deal to find a way to let their companies keep doing business with Iranian institutions.

However, Iran’s expansion as a regional power largely took place before the nuclear deal was signed, and the comprehensive international sanctions that existed in the years leading up to the agreement did not deter Tehran’s support for extremist groups in Arab countries like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain and Yemen.

So the Gulf states don’t expect sanctions alone to do the trick. They hope that with Islamic State crushed in Iraq and Syria, Washington will now lead a coordinated regional strategy to cut Iran’s power down to size.

Among other things, they want limited and focused military action to reverse some of the gains Iran has made since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Indeed, they’ve already taken on the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, as well as the local al-Qaeda affiliate. They may also hope to play a role in confronting Iran’s lawless behavior in the waters of the Gulf itself.

They are looking for Washington to take the lead in confronting Iran in Iraq, but there, too, Saudi Arabia has shown it is willing to play a diplomatic, political and financial role.

Perhaps the most strategically vital theater in any such campaign would be Syria, which is far from the Gulf countries. There, they hope that Israel will enforce its own red lines on Iranian conduct and make life difficult for the Hezbollah militants in Syria and possibly even in their home base of Lebanon.

They would urge the U.S. to prevent Iran from taking advantage of the collapse of Islamic State in western Iraq and eastern Syria in order to create a secured military corridor running from Iran to Lebanon and the Mediterranean. Such a strategic upheaval, if secured and consolidated, would ensure that Iran emerges as a regional superpower.

Gulf Arab countries also want to work with the U.S. to persuade Turkey and Russia that their interests in Syria are not served by an empowered and aggressive Iran. Otherwise, Russia could prove a major obstacle to reducing Iran’s influence in Syria and getting Hezbollah to go back to Lebanon.

Finally, while the Gulf countries don’t want an all-out war with Iran, there are signs of Arab and American encouragement of uprisings by Iranian ethnic minorities such as Baluchis, Arabs and Kurds.

The goal isn’t regime change, partly because that’s not considered a serious possibility at the moment. What they want, instead, is a sustained containment campaign to pressure Iran to change its behavior and ambitions and constrain its ability to destabilize neighbors and spread influence.

It’s a big ask, and probably bigger than many Gulf Arab leaders realize. After decades of U.S. leadership in the region, these countries grew used to, and benefited from, a U.S.-enforced regional order. But now, especially after Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans across the political spectrum have an advanced case of Middle East war fatigue. Trump’s “America First” campaign didn’t signal much enthusiasm for the kind of interventionist foreign policy that these Gulf allies are hoping for.

But if the U.S. wants to combat terrorism and confront Iran, as the administration insists it does, Trump’s idea of withdrawing the more than 2,000 U.S. forces in Syria is a nonstarter.

The Gulf countries aren’t asking for a repetition of the 2003 adventure in Iraq, which they didn’t support or encourage. What they want is a multi-front effort to roll back Iran’s influence by defanging its proxies, supporting its enemies and insurgents and choking off its economy. Only Washington, they believe, can do that. The idea is especially to weaken Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and its clients around the region.

Containing Iran will take time, effort and troops and will not be painless. But it needn’t and shouldn’t be a madcap adventure like the campaign that began in 2003 to remake Iraq in an American image. Instead, as Russia has demonstrated in Syria, even in the Middle East it’s possible to secure limited goals with limited means, especially if allies work together. That’s what Saudi Arabia and the UAE are hoping is in the works for a Plan B regarding Iran.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/palestinians-need-a-gandhi-like-figure-to-front-non-violent-protests-against-israeli-rule-1.731761