Just when we thought we had a good understanding of President Donald Trump’s Middle East policy — which boils down to “get out of the region and avoid another endless war there” — he pulls off something dramatic like this.
After a career in the military with a lot of time spent in this region, I have learned that you must respect your adversaries and their ability to hurt us.
In the wake of the airstrike, there have been many calls inside Iraq for restraint among Iraqis and between the Americans and the Iranians, most notably from the Shi’a clerical establishment in Najaf. There is a wide consensus in Iraq that the country should not be at the center of an American-Iranian military fight.
The killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, was a major and unexpected blow to the Iranian leadership. It punctured the aura of invincibility and the hubris that have characterized Soleimani and his colleagues’ behavior.
The three uprisings in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon represent the revolt of a new generation seeking to build a better future for itself. Since 2011, there have been 11 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. All 11 uprisings have similar drivers: the explosive dysfunction of high demographic growth, low levels of economic development and job creation, poor government performance and services, and high levels of corruption and inequality.
The protestors are demanding a radical change of the ethno-sectarian power-sharing system put in place after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Two months into the popular uprisings in Iraq and Lebanon, both countries are mired in a painful standoff.
Political analyst Hafsa Halawa and MEI Senior Fellow Alex Vatanka join host Alistair Taylor to discuss the political crisis in Iraq following the resignation of Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, the protest movements that have rocked both Iraq and Iran, and the impact of Iranian impact in Baghdad on Iraq’s development going forward.
There is no end in sight to Iraq’s political crisis even though Parliament unanimously voted to remove Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi on Sunday. Abdul-Mahdi now tends a caretaker government while Iraq’s political leaders are interpreting the country’s constitution to give President Barham Salih 15 days starting from Nov. 30 to name a new prime minister.
Tehran’s reaction to the resignation of Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi is one of accepting the seemingly inevitable.
Although 350 Iraqis have died to date and close to 16,000 have been wounded, protesters are not going home. Yet, most of the ruling clique is still rejecting the idea of forcing the prime minister to resign.
Since early October, the southern provinces of Iraq have been consumed by protests and strikes. While ruthlessly attempting to suppress protests, the Iraqi government has promised legal and political reforms. Yet some of the Kurdistan Region-Iraq’s elites are suspicious that the government’s reform agenda is a “conspiracy” against Kurdish entitlements masquerading as a good faith effort to placate the protestors. The region’s hegemonic parties are concerned that legal, constitutional, and procedural reforms may overhaul the institutions that guarantee their positions of influence in the federal government and secure their territorial claims.
Iranian mediation might bring the two big political blocs to an agreement on a new government, but the protest movement demands only new, clean faces and won’t readily accept another cabinet drawn from discredited political blocs.
MEI’s Paul Salem and Randa Slim join host Alistair Taylor to discuss the nationwide protests that have swept through Lebanon and Iraq this week resulting in political and economic turmoil as well as crackdowns by security forces. Where do things go from here?
