Coalition Of The Shilling

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, says Germany isn't sending men or planes to fight in Iraq, which is significantly different from what President Obama is asserting. Instead, says Steinmeier, let Iran do the heavy lifting. At Friday's UN Security Council session on ISIS, he said that "[d]espite the difficulties that we have with Iran and its nuclear ambitions, I am of the opinion that all of the neighbors of Syria and Iraq should be included… I sincerely hope that Iran will be considered, for only then will we be able to get control of the threat posed by IS."

Over the weekend the editors of the NY Times wondered about an Iranian role in the battle against ISIS, The Unlikeliest of Coalitions. In fact, they're casting a great deal of doubt on America's ability to put any kind of effective coalition together in the Middle East, and they ran down the obstacles, country by country.

TURKEY

More than any other Sunni Muslim state, Turkey, a NATO member with one of the region’s largest armies, should be a strong ally. Yet it ruled out a front-line role, citing concerns for the safety of 49 Turkish diplomats who had been taken hostage by ISIS (they were returned to Turkey on Saturday). It also fears that efforts to arm Kurdish fighters in Iraq to fight ISIS could embolden Kurdish separatist militants in Turkey.

The Turkish government, determined to see Mr. Assad overthrown, has been supporting insurgent groups in Syria since the start of the civil war and allowing them to pass freely across the Turkish border into Syria. But even though ISIS has now proved itself a threat to Turkey and beyond, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, has failed to take aggressive measures to stop the cross-border flow of foreign fighters, weapons and oil trade benefiting ISIS. In fact, Turkey’s open-border policy early on in the Syrian war was central to the rise of ISIS…

SAUDI ARABIA AND THE GULF STATES

Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates were among 10 Arab states that recently promised to “do their share” to defeat ISIS. Many of these states have for a long time aided rival Islamist and militant groups, including in Syria. For example, although Qatar hosts the largest American military base in the region, it has supported a range of Islamist groups (including Islamic radicals in Syria) with safe haven, financial aid and weapons. Saudi Arabia has allowed sheikhs linked to Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch to raise funds openly, and the United Arab Emirates backed a faction in Libya against Islamic militias supported by Qatar.

Against this backdrop, however, some productive commitments have been made. Saudi Arabia has agreed to host a major base for training Syrian opposition forces. And Jordan, already a site for rebel training, is expected to provide intelligence.

While American officials say some countries, which they have not identified, want to join American forces in making airstrikes against militants in Iraq, the United States must carefully incorporate participation by Muslim countries so it does not further inflame sectarian tensions and anti-American feeling.

IRAN AND SYRIA

Both the United States and Iran, adversaries since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, consider ISIS a threat. But Iranian leaders have ruled out direct cooperation in repelling the extremist group. Iran, one of the Assad regime’s strongest allies, is worried that American airstrikes in Syria and expanded support for Syrian rebel forces could further damage Mr. Assad’s hold on power. American leaders have been cool to cooperating with Iran because that would anger Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Muslim states. Negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program, now at a critical point, are also affecting these calculations.

Whether the Obama administration can bring all of these and other conflicting agendas into a coherent military and political alliance against the Islamic State is far from certain. So far, the focus has mostly been on what military-related assistance such partners can offer.

What is certain is that there can never be real success against ISIS without some kind of political settlement in Syria, an inclusive government in Iraq and some reduction in the Sunni-Shiite tensions that created space for ISIS to grow. In this regard, Saudi Arabia’s decisions to reopen its embassy in Baghdad, invite Iraq to the recent coalition meeting in Jidda and invite an Iranian official for talks in Riyadh were unheralded but potentially important steps toward a united front.

At the same time the NY Times was fretting about putting together a coalition, The Telegraph was writing about the duplicitous role American regional "ally" Qatar has been-- and still is-- playing. Remember, Qatar, an oil-rich peninsula that juts out into the Persian Gulf from Saudi Arabia is just 4,467 square miles of waterless desert (bigger than Delaware and smaller than Connecticut). The country is a feudal Wahhabi monarchy with 278,000 Qatari citizens and about a million and a half foreign workers, many of whom are, in effect, slaves. Materially very rich and, socially, very backward. David Blair and Richard Spencer, writing for The Telegraph make the point that the cash (and weapons) for the Islamist extremists-- Libya Dawn-- who have taken over Libya's capital and forced the pro-Western government to flee was provided by Qataris.

The remarkable truth is that few in the Middle East would be shocked. From Hamas in the Gaza Strip to radical armed movements in Syria, Qatar's status as a prime sponsor of violent Islamists, including groups linked to al-Qaeda, is clear to diplomats and experts.

Qatar's promotion of extremism has so infuriated its neighbours that Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates all chose to withdraw their ambassadors from the country in March.

Take Syria, where Qatar has been sponsoring the rebellion against Bashar al-Assad's regime. In itself, that policy places Qatar alongside the leading Western powers and much of the Arab world.

But Qatar has deliberately channelled guns and cash towards Islamist rebels, notably a group styling itself Ahrar al-Sham, or "Free Men of Syria". Only last week, Khalid al-Attiyah, the Qatari foreign minister, praised this movement as "purely" Syrian.

He added that its fighters had suffered heavy losses while combating the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), the group behind the murder of David Haines, the British aid worker, and which is holding John Cantlie and Alan Henning hostage.

Far from being a force for moderation, Ahrar al-Sham played a key role in transforming the anti-Assad revolt into an Islamist uprising. Its men fought alongside Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda affiliate, during the battle for Aleppo and they were accused of at least one sectarian massacre.

Instead of fighting Isil, Ahrar al-Sham helped the jihadists to run Raqqa, the town in eastern Syria that is now the capital of the self-proclaimed "Caliphate." This cooperation with Isil happened for some months until the two groups fell out last year.

Last December, the US Treasury designated a Qatari academic and businessman, Abdul Rahman al-Nuaimi, as a "global terrorist." The US accused him of sending nearly £366,000 to "al-Qaeda's representative in Syria," named as Abu Khalid al-Suri.

Suri has also been a senior commander of Ahrar al-Sham. If America was right to describe him as "al-Qaeda's representative," then there was an overlap between the leadership of the two groups.

Mr Nuaimi is also accused by the US treasury of transferring as much as $2 million per month to "al-Qaeda in Iraq" and $250,000 to al-Shabaab, the movement's affiliate in Somalia. Mr Nuaimi denies the allegations, saying they are motivated by his own criticism of US policy.

…Last month, Gerd Müller, the German international development minister, implicated Qatar in the rise of Isil. "You have to ask who is arming, who is financing Isil troops. The keyword there is Qatar," he said.

Yet a state endowed with large reserves of gas and oil and one of the world's biggest sovereign wealth funds can wield immense influence, even over Berlin. Qatar was duly able to secure a formal withdrawal of this charge from the German government.

The following day The Telegraph ran an unsigned editorial whose first sentence was "Enough is enough," Funding Terrorists Is Not What Friends Do.

Finally, politicians are starting to ask who is financing the people who do these terrible things. Vernon Coaker, the shadow defence secretary, has called on ministers to press states in the Arab region to cease sending funds to the “brutal” jihadists. “These are dangerous people and we have to defeat them and one of the ways to do that is to cut off their source of funding,” Mr Coaker told this newspaper.

Indeed, an investigation for The Telegraph discovered that while oil-rich Qatar denies ever financing Isil, it did become the main patron for an extremist group fighting in Syria called Ahrar al-Sham and that Qatari weapons and money may have reached the Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate. Meanwhile, Western diplomats believe that Qatar supplied arms to the Islamist coalition that captured Tripoli in Libya last month. And Qatar is a longstanding backer of Hamas, the radical Palestinian movement in Gaza. In 2012, Hamas’s political leaders moved their headquarters from Damascus in Syria to Doha, the Qatari capital.

Stephen Barclay, a Tory MP, has suggested that British diplomats might be unwilling to confront the Qataris for fear of frightening away their cash investments in the UK. But speak up they must. Security and the safety of British citizens is priceless-- and it cannot be right that a state such as Qatar can, on the one hand, support radical groups and, on the other, enjoy such a lucrative partnership with the West. It should be compelled to do the right thing.

UPDATE: So It Begins… Again

BOOM! Obama started bombing ISIS bases in Syria tonight. Supposedly, warplanes from Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and even Qatar took part. The main target was Raqqa which is about 100 miles east of Aleppo, Syria's biggest city-- or at least it was Syria's biggest city until it was much diminished by war. The population of Raqqa is somewhat under a quarter million people-- smaller now since the 10% of the population that was Christian has fled. It was the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate (796 to 809) and ISIS uses it as their "capital" now, although probably not for long.