Category Archives: Islamic State

Donald Trump, Government, Islamic State, Politics, Society, Terrorism, United States

President Trump launches a new war on terror

UNITED STATES

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President Donald Trump has vowed to wipe Islamic State from the ‘face of the Earth’ – and to link arms with old allies like Britain.

Intro: Defeating ISIS and other radical Islamic terror groups will be America’s highest priority.

The newly elected President of the United States, Donald Trump, has launched a new war on terror and has vowed to eliminate Islamic State ‘from the face of the earth’.

But his bold declaration to “eradicate completely” radical Islamic terrorism was at odds with his inauguration speech ‘America First’ inward-looking agenda.

And it is not clear how Mr Trump and his advisors plan to succeed without jeopardising international relations and running up huge costs on military operations.

While he has previously promised a more effective military campaign than that of Barack Obama, many of the actions he might take to accelerate progress in Iraq and Syria come with potentially dangerous side effects.

These include the deterioration of already strained ties with NATO ally Turkey, an increase in America or civilian casualties and reinvigorated militant recruitment.

It is extraordinary, given the tentacles of the terror group’s extended reach across Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Tunisia and Libya – as well as parts of France, Belgium, Italy – and Britain.

Sceptics were also quick to point out that several past presidents, most notably George W. Bush, had failed to keep similar promises to beat terrorism. Yet in his speech, Mr Trump threw down the gauntlet to Islamic State and its supporters around the world.

He said: ‘We will reinforce old alliances and form new ones – and unite the civilised world against Radical Islamic Terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth.

‘We will be protected by the great men and women of our military and law enforcement, and, most importantly, we are protected by God.’

He has said that on taking office, he will tell his top generals they have (just) 30 days to present him with a plan for defeating IS.

Since Mr Trump’s inauguration on Friday 20 January, his administration has expanded on the plans to defeat terrorism.

A statement on the White House website said: ‘Defeating ISIS and other radical Islamic terror groups will be our highest priority. To defeat and destroy these groups, we will pursue aggressive joint and coalition military operations when necessary. In addition, the Trump Administration will work with international partners to cut off funding for terrorist groups, to expand intelligence sharing, and to engage in cyberwarfare to disrupt and disable propaganda and recruiting.

‘Next, we will rebuild the American military. Our Navy has shrunk from more than 500 ships in 1991 to 275 in 2016. Our Air Force is roughly one third smaller than in 1991.

‘President Trump is committed to reversing this trend, because he knows that our military dominance must be unquestioned. Finally, in pursuing a foreign policy based on American interests, we will embrace diplomacy. The world must know that we do not go abroad in search of enemies, that we are always happy when old enemies become friends, and when old friends become allies. The world will be more peaceful and more prosperous with a stronger and more respected America.’

He also pledged to ‘reinforce old alliances’ in a sign that Britain’s “special relationship” with the US could be boosted under his leadership. In response, Theresa May said she was certain Mr Trump intends to advance links between Britain and the US. Mrs May said: ‘I congratulate President Trump on taking office.’

‘From our conversations to date, I know we are both committed to advancing the special relationship between our two countries and working together for the prosperity and security of people on both sides of the Atlantic.’

Looking at the pledges made by President Trump during his inaugural speech on Capitol Hill on Friday, January 20, 2017:

IN-BRIEF

. Build The Wall – Mr Trump said: ‘We will bring back our borders.’ But his campaign pledge to build ‘an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful, southern border wall’ between the U.S. and Mexico was not mentioned.

. Guns – Keen to placate gun rights supporters, Mr Trump has promised to abolish gun-free zones around schools and military bases. ‘My first day, it gets signed – no more gun-free zones,’ he has said. He says gun-free zones are a magnet for mentally-ill gunmen.

. Bring Back Jobs – Mr Trump has pledged to rebuild America ‘with American hands’ and ‘follow two simple rules – buy American and hire American’. His promise to help jobless American workers in the country’s depressed heartland was, for many voters, his most important pledge. Critics say it will also be the trickiest as many of those manufacturing jobs appear to have moved to lower-wage countries for good. The President has vowed personally to call the bosses of major US firms who plan to move jobs overseas and warn them they face a 35 per cent tariff if they go ahead.

. Drain The Swamp – His 100-day action plan included six measures to tackle what he sees as sleaze and corruption. They include a constitutional amendment to impose terms limits on all Congress members, a hiring freeze on all federal government employees, restrictions on the creation of new regulations and a limit on the lobbying activities of White House and congressional officials after they leave office.

. Protect US Trade – He has promised to immediately renegotiate or withdraw from the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the deal that governs commerce with, among others, Mexico. He has also vowed to dash plans to take the US into the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

. Control Immigration – Decisions on immigration ‘will be made to benefit American workers and American families’, Mr Trump said, although he also added: ‘When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.’ In recent weeks, he has backed away from his call for a temporary ban on Muslim visitors entering the country. Instead, he has said he plans from his first day in office to suspend immigration from ‘terror prone’ countries and impose ‘extreme vetting’ on others.

. Repeal Obamacare – Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, reforming America’s famously complicated and expensive health insurance system, was his administration’s most radical achievement. It guarantees health coverage for all Americans but has landed many people with higher bills. Mr Trump intends to scrap it.

. Infrastructure – One of the few areas where Mr Trump is likely to get Democratic support is his pledge to spend $1trillion over the next decade on investing in America’s crumbling infrastructure. In his speech, he pledged to ‘build new roads, highways, bridges, airports, tunnels and railways’. Such huge spending will surely complicate his plans to slash taxes, especially for business, without plunging the US further into the red.

. Global Warming – Mr Trump has previously questioned the existence of global warming, describing it as a hoax dreamt up by China. Confirming the fears of many environmentalists, the White House website has already signalled President Trump’s intentions on climate change, saying he is ‘committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the US rule’. Mr Trump has promised to tell the United Nations that the US will no longer be contributing money towards its climate change programmes.

. A New Missile Defence System – One of Mr Trump’s first moves was to announce plans for a missile defence system to protect the US against attacks from Iran and North Korea. The announcement on the White House website contained no further detail about the measures being planned. It remains unclear whether it could be a ground- or air-based system – or, more controversially, satellite-based like Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative, better known as ‘Star Wars’. First announced in 1983, Star Wars was intended to protect the US against Soviet aggression during the Cold War.

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Britain, Government, Iraq, Islamic State, Politics, Terrorism, United Nations, United States

The West has a responsibility in Iraq

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Mosul: Violence in Iraq continues to escalate.

IRAQ

Intro: Recognising the huge human cost that the war is having on Iraq, we must accept and understand that we have an ongoing responsibility to help bring the bloodshed to an end.

Violence still engulfs Iraq. The United Nations has said that at least 6,878 Iraqi civilians were killed in 2016, a number that is most certain to be on the low side because of the unverifiable number of civilian deaths in war zones. And we do not know the full death toll from the ongoing fighting in that country because the Iraqi government has not published the causality figures for government troops and paramilitary forces fighting in Mosul and elsewhere in northern Iraq. It is a tragic toll.

In December alone, 109 civilians perished and 523 injured in Baghdad. These are largely attributed to Islamic State who have claimed responsibility for a string of bombings. But, as IS get shifted out of Mosul and other areas they have controlled, the bombings will only get worse. Fanatics will carry on the fight on the streets of the country’s cities.

Recognising the huge human cost that the war is having on Iraq, we must accept and understand that we have an ongoing responsibility to help bring the bloodshed to an end. Along with the United States we were at the forefront of the regime change invasion of Iraq that has unleashed such a violent insurrection since. Britain cannot be allowed to wash its hands as if now the mayhem has nothing to do with them. It does.

The conclusions of the Chilcot Inquiry found many failings of the UK but was specifically critical of the way in which the U.S. dismantled the security and intelligence apparatus of Saddam Hussein’s army, as well as describing the whole invasion as a strategic failure. Whilst the immediate violence is largely being perpetrated by IS and its fanatics, the West could have served the Iraqi people much better after getting involved.

It is always difficult to stand back and watch merciless dictators with no compunction committing butchery on their own people, but the long-term costs of not thinking through action from the start is now all too clear. Western intervention and the lack of proper military plans in Iraq – in dealing with all that has happened since that ill-fated invasion of 2003 – explains much of what we are witnessing now. Hideous incompetence.

A lesson we still seem not to have learnt in Syria.

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Arts, Books, Britain, Government, Iraq, Islamic State, Politics, Syria, Terrorism, United States

Book Review – Black Flag Down: Counter-Extremism & Defeating ISIS

BOOK REVIEW

Intro: In his new book Liam Byrne MP argues that the British government is making critical mistakes in its methods of combating home-grown extremism. Defeating Islamic State will probably mean taking on the digital caliphate.

THE WORLD was caught by surprise in June 2014 when the infamous terrorist group Islamic State (IS) declared a caliphate in the heart of the Middle East. Within the space of just a few short months, like a rapidly spreading avenging fire, it had scorched across Syria and much of Iraq. In so doing, the group carved out an empire stretching more than 400 miles from Aleppo to the Iraqi town of Sulaiman Bek, a town just 60 miles from the Iranian border.

IS, also known as Isis, or Da’esh, seemed unstoppable at first, but it has now been pushed back, possibly decisively. Since the group inaugurated, it has lost an estimated 45,000 jihadists, as well as a slew of key towns and resources it previously controlled. Its most direct enemies – Kurds, Iraqi troops and Shia militias – are largely contained in Iraq’s second city, Mosul, and are advancing on the group’s de facto Syrian capital, Raqqa.

In this timely book, the Labour MP Liam Byrne, points out that the fight against Isis and its brutal ideology has many fronts. Isis is obsessed with controlling territory, as well as having higher aspirations by creating a global caliphate. For many years, though, the group existed without any territory. With its war on the world going badly, its digital caliphate is becoming ever more important.

Byrne offers up a wide-ranging and discursive study. In his book, he elicits and concentrates on what is arguably the most significant fight of all: the ‘battle of ideas’. Whilst his journey has taken him to northern Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, his most interesting discoveries are found and reported upon within in his own parliamentary constituency of Birmingham Hodge Hill. Here, Muslims boast the highest share of the population of any area in the UK.

Byrne is assertive that Isis and other jihadi groups such as Boko Haram and al-Qaeda are fundamentally heretical by nature. Essentially, he says, they are death cults, with as much relevance to most Muslims as David Koresh has had on mainstream Christianity. Ironically, however, Isis claims to espouse the purest form of Islam, the creed and doctrine pursued in the 7th century by the Prophet Muhammad. It believes that it has the power to repudiate and excommunicate apostates, an act known as takfir. But as the world has come to witness, this has metastasised into exterminations and genocide, as Christians, Kurds, Yazidis, and Muslims in the Middle East can attest.

In the immediate aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the group, notoriously known to the world as al-Qaeda, morphed with Saddam Hussein’s avowedly secular Ba’ath Party. What emerged was something yet even more ferocious as the terrorist group had a firm apparatus in which to operate from.

The objective of Isis was to trigger conflict between Iraq’s Shia majority, which came to power after the invasion, and the Sunni minority, which hitherto had the reins of power. The group’s global aim was to foment division between Muslims and everyone else.

Mr Byrne is of the firm believe that the British government is making a critical mistake in its methods of combating home-grown radicalism and extremism. He says its doctrine is symptomatic of a ‘clash of civilisations’ which makes Islam the problem. Counter-extremism programmes which operate in the UK such as Prevent are based on a ‘conveyer belt’ theory that specifically highlights religious conservatism as the trigger for radicalisation. But the author, citing security and academic sources, argues that anger and resentment, often engendered by a sense of marginalisation, are more powerful factors.

We should – at the very least – recognise the true nature of the extremist threat we face. The U.S. president-elect’s declared solution to dealing with Isis including heavy bombing and barring all Muslims from entering his country are, though, the very antithesis of proper reason and rationality which seems to be in such short supply these days. For clear insight, we could do worse than reach for Liam Byrne’s excellent and revealing narrative.

–     Black Flag Down: Counter-Extremism, Defeating Isis and Winning the Battle of Ideas by Liam Byrne is published by Biteback at £12.99

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