Analysis: The effects of the Iraq War on the Kurdish issue in Turkey

This article examines the potential repercussions of the Iraq War on the Kurdish issue in Turkey. An introduction to the Kurdish problem and its securitisation in Turkey precedes an analysis of the Gulf War's impact on Turkey's policies towards the Kurds—in both Turkey and Iraq. The article briefly documents the struggle between the EU's pressures on Turkey after 1999 to improve Kurdish rights and the state's reluctance to implement reforms. Impacting reforms is the heightened sense of insecurity in Turkey after the Iraq War and the perceived threat of greater autonomy for the Kurds in Northern Iraq. In response, Turkey has identified the Turkmen minority as a key strategic concern. None the less, increasingly the ruling Justice and Development Party's attitude towards Iraqi Kurdish groups indicates the evolution of a more pragmatic approach. In conclusion, two possible options emerge: the continued desecuritisation of the Kurdish issue in Turkey or its re-securitisation.     

Iran's Hezbollah Model in Iraq and Syria: Fait Accompli?

This essay argues the wars in Iraq and Syria are not over. Iran has used the war against the Islamic State, and, more generally, the instability in Iraq and Syria, to successfully spread and legitimize its influence. If the U.S. intends to challenge Iran's influence in Syria and Iraq, it needs to demonstrate its long-term commitment to its local partners, and it needs to work with its partners to secure and stabilize eastern Syria and western Iraq. Countering Iran's influence in Iraq and Syria is a long-term project, and creating viable alternatives to Iranian influence in Damascus and Baghdad is the best way to prevent them from becoming long-term Iranian dependencies.This article is part of a special project conducted by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, titled: “After the Caliphate: Reassessing the Jihadi Threat and Stabilizing the Fertile Crescent,” which includes a book, a thematic issue of Orbis: FPRI's Journal of World Affairs (Summer 2018), and a series of podcasts. Each element of the project can be found here: https://www.fpri.org/research/after-the-caliphate-project/.     

‘Phase IV’ Operations in the War on Terror: Comparing Iraq and Afghanistan

This article identifies the obstacles and prospects of implementing President Obama's surge strategy in Afghanistan by examining four issues: (1) the origins and implementation of the Iraq surge policy; (2) U.S. counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan; (3) a comparative examination of Afghan and Iraqi tribal insurgent structures; and (4) suggestions for a counter insurgency policy more in sync with regional social and tribal structures.     

Mayhem,Myths, and Martyrdom: The Shi'a Conception of Jihad

The article examines the perception of jihad in Shi'a Islam. It first provides an overview of the understanding of jihad in Islam at large, and then examines the reflections of four central Shi'a thinkers on jihad. More so than the traditional Sunni approach to this concept, the Shi'a understanding of jihad is heavily influenced by perceptions of historical suffering, placing an emphasis on injustice, tyrannical rule, indignity, humiliation, and resistance. In recent decades, Shi'a and Sunni notions of jihad have become more closely aligned, as Salafi-Jihadists, who increasingly monopolize the Sunni discourse on jihad, persistently frame jihad as a response to the oppression by Western “infidel” regimes and tyrannical “apostate” regimes in the Arab and Muslim world.     

Immunizing Iraq Against al-Qaeda 3.0

Iraq still faces the same economic challenges that contributed to the rise of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. And unless these challenges are resolved, the likelihood of future political stability is low. The extremely high level of unemployment and underemployment among Iraq's youth, combined with massive corruption, is contributing to widespread poverty and radicalization. The Iraqi government's efforts to deal with these challenges are hamstrung by the expectation that current low oil prices will continue for a decade or more. These obstacles will constrain state-led development efforts severely. Iraq needs to execute successfully anti-corruption and pro-youth employment strategies that draw on the experience of other states, but are crafted to meet Iraq's unique conditions.This article is part of a special project conducted by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, titled: “After the Caliphate: Reassessing the Jihadi Threat and Stabilizing the Fertile Crescent,” which includes a book, a thematic issue of Orbis: FPRI's Journal of World Affairs (Summer 2018), and a series of podcasts. Each element of the project can be found here: https://www.fpri.org/research/after-the-caliphate-project/.     

A Manual of Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorism

The current wave of so-called 'suicide-bombings' perpetrated by Muslims has been part of Shi'ite Islamic idealization of suffering and death, meant for the Believer to identify with the ordeal of Imam Hussein in the seventh century CE. It was revived by the Shi'ite Hizballah in Lebanon against the Americans and the Israelis, and then expanded by Sunnite Palestinian Islamists, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and even by avowedly 'secular' Palestinian groups such as the Fatah's al-Aqsa Brigades and Tanzim. But the justifications for all those groups are, nevertheless, curiously Islamic. This article presents the text written by a prominent cleric and diffused in the Palestinian media, rationalizing suicide-bombing as the ultimate mode of struggle against Muslim enemies.     

Beyond Kinetic Operations: A Road Map to Success in Syria and Iraq

Kinetic operations—either overt, covert, or clandestine— should only be employed with ample forethought as to what they are intended to achieve and whether the costs are worth the benefits. Notwithstanding their advantages and disadvantages, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) will not be defeated through kinetic operations alone. When linking tactical operations to the strategic goal of degrading a terrorist threat, post-conflict stabilization and rebuilding are often required to cement tactical victories into a desired and sustainable end state. Terrorism, including ISIS, is not an existential threat to the U.S. and requires a multi-layer approach that is not linear and should encompass locally derived goals. The U.S. government should envision kinetic operations as only one part of a broader strategy to stabilize Iraq and Syria after the collapse of ISIS, or it will continue to find itself in a perpetual war.This article is part of a special project conducted by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, titled: “After the Caliphate: Reassessing the Jihadi Threat and Stabilizing the Fertile Crescent,” which includes a book, a thematic issue of Orbis: FPRI's Journal of World Affairs (Summer 2018), and a series of podcasts. Each element of the project can be found here: https://www.fpri.org/research/after-the-caliphate-project/.     

Bargaining,Fear, and Denial: Explaining Violence Against Civilians in Iraq 2004–2007

From mid-2004 to mid-2007, the Iraq war was distinguished from other comparable insurgencies by its high rates of civilian victimization. This has been attributed to a number of different factors, including the role of Islamic fundamentalist groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq as well as the regional ambitions of Iran and Syria. Using an unpublished dataset of violence in Iraq from 2003–2008 from the Iraq Body Count (IBC), this paper argues that the violence against civilians is best understood as a combination of three interacting logics—bargaining, fear, and denial—that are predominantly local in character. First, armed Iraqi actors bargained through violence both across and within sectarian communities, and were driven by mechanisms of outbidding and outflanking to escalate their attacks on civilians. Second, the pervasive fear about the future of the Iraqi state encouraged the “localization” of violence in Iraq, particularly in the emergence of a security dilemma and the proliferation of criminal and tribal actors. Finally, Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda in Iraq played the spoiler in Iraq, using mass-casualty attacks to generate fear among the population and deny U.S. efforts to build a functioning state. Only by addressing each of these three logics as part of its counter-insurgency strategy can the U.S. put an end to violence against civilians and develop the Iraqi state into a credible competitor for the loyalties of the population.     

An Arab Option for Iraq

This article argues that a reemerging Iraqi Arab nationalism offers a chance for Iraqis to combat sectarian politics. Sectarianism, which Iran as well as various Sunni and Shi‘i Islamists have promoted in Iraq since 2003, ultimately created the instability and malcontent out of which ISIS emerged. Now that ISIS has been defeated on the battlefield, stakeholders should look to consolidate their military victories by transforming them into real political gains. The best way to do so is to build institutions and promote political identity based on the notion of an Arab Iraq.This article is part of a special project conducted by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, titled: “After the Caliphate: Reassessing the Jihadi Threat and Stabilizing the Fertile Crescent,” which includes a book, a thematic issue of Orbis: FPRI's Journal of World Affairs (Summer 2018), and a series of podcasts. Each element of the project can be found here: https://www.fpri.org/research/after-the-caliphate-project/.     

Going Global: Islamist Competition in Contemporary Civil Wars

The global landscape of modern jihad is highly diverse and wrought with conflict between rival Islamist factions. Within this inter-Islamist competition, some factions prove to be more robust and durable than others. This research proposes that the adoption of a global identity allows an Islamist group to better recruit and expand their domestic political power across ethnic and tribal divisions without being constrained by local politics. Islamists that rely on an ethnic or tribal identity are more prone to group fragmentation, whereas global Islamists are better able to retain group cohesion by purging their ranks of dissenters. To examine these two processes, I present original field research and primary source analysis to examine Islamist in-fighting in Somalia from 2006–2014 and then expand my analysis to Iraq and Syria, Pakistan, and Mali.     

Origins of Regime Change: “Ideapolitik” on the Long Road to Baghdad, 1993–2000

How was the ouster of Saddam Hussein defined as the solution to America's Iraq problem? Current scholarship on the U.S. invasion of Iraq tends to focus on the post-9/11 road to war, promoting models of policy capture, intelligence manipulation, threat-inflation, or rhetorical coercion of Bush administration opponents. In this essay, I trace the “Ideapolitik” of regime change in the 1990s and show that Bush's post-9/11 rhetoric was firmly embedded in a preexisting foreign policy consensus defining Saddam Hussein as the “problem” and his overthrow as its “solution.” Drawing upon recent research in international relations and public policy, I show how the idea of regime change prevailed in redefining American strategy for Iraq. While the September 11, 2001 attacks had important effects on the Bush administration's willingness to use force, the basic idea that ousting Saddam Hussein would solve the Iraq problem was already embedded in elite discourse. Saddam Hussein's ouster was not simply the result of idiosyncratic or nefarious decision-making processes within the Bush administration, but was instead the realization of a social choice made by U.S. foreign policy elites well before George W. Bush came to power.     

A Means of First Resort: Explaining “Hot Pursuit” in International Relations

This article provides a new theory of hot pursuit—the use of military force by a state against a nonstate actor across borders—in international relations. Drawing from the literature on civil-military relations, I argue that attitudes on limited use of force in peripheral areas will vary between civilian and military, with the latter preferring to treat hot pursuit as a policing operation, whereas the former will treat it as a military one. The logic of my argument is that militaries are oriented structurally and culturally to fight conventionally and against state near-peer adversaries. Threats emanating from nonstate actors, while at times perceived to be existential, require “pin-prick”-style targeted airstrikes, raids by commando forces, or policing operations along a state's periphery. I draw on an original dataset of “hot pursuit” (1975–2009) I collected and examine two recent case studies: India's hot pursuit of ethnic militants into Myanmar and Turkey's pursuit of Kurdish militants into Iraq and Syria.     

Vicarious Retribution in US Public Support for War Against Iraq

US public anger and desire to avenge the September 11, 2001 terror attacks were redirected toward Iraq partly because of its identity as an Arab and Muslim state. Online panel survey data reveal that citizens who were relatively angry about the terror attacks were more belligerent toward Iraq, an effect that was strongest among those who perceived Arabs and Muslims in monolithic terms. The angry desire to avenge 9/11 was more persistent for those who saw Arabs and Muslims in that light, and its effect on war support was partially mediated by worsened feelings about Arabs and Muslims in general. These findings help explain why public belligerence toward Iraq shot up right after 9/11, before President George W. Bush began alleging that Iraq was pursuing weapons of mass destruction and had ties to al Qaeda.     

Assessing the Future Threat: ISIS's Virtual Caliphate

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria's (ISIS) Virtual Caliphate shows no signs of diminishment. With the group's loss of territory and with social media platforms increasingly policed, Telegram, a messaging application, remains ISIS's key platform for disseminating propaganda and recruiting new members. Telegram's security features, cross-platform construction, and secret chat option offer a secure environment for interaction between ISIS and its supporters. On Telegram, ISIS manipulates an environment rich with addictive properties, creating online spaces that encourage group identity, shared opinions, and dominant ideologies, while exploiting an individual's need to be a part of the group. This research investigates how Telegram is used by ISIS and its supporters and assesses what kind of threat the use of Telegram poses for the future.The research is supported in part by the Office of Naval Research “Documenting the Virtual Caliphate” #N00014-16-1-3174. All opinions are exclusively those of the authors and do not represent the Department of Defense or the Navy. This article is part of a special project conducted by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, titled: “After the Caliphate: Reassessing the Jihadi Threat and Stabilizing the Fertile Crescent,” which includes a book, a thematic issue of Orbis: FPRI's Journal of World Affairs (Summer 2018), and a series of podcasts. Each element of the project can be found here: https://www.fpri.org/research/after-the-caliphate-project/.     

Evaluating Claims of Social Connection to International Conflict Casualties

Recent studies examining the political impact of individuals' connections to the victims of international violence find these ties have a powerful effect on people's attitudes and feelings. How reliable, however, are self-reported claims of ties to a conflict's casualties? Using data from 9/11 and the Iraq War, I examine these claims, analyzing: 1) their influence on both public assessments of foreign policy and voting behavior, 2) whether critical demographic and political factors predict the likelihood of individuals reporting a tie to a conflict casualty, 3) the predicted, aggregate likelihood of survey respondents having connections to conflict victims, and 4) the theoretical distinction between actual vs. perceived casualty connections. The results strongly support the use of casualty connection data for understanding individuals' responses to international violence, and encourage future applications of social network approaches to the study of war and politics.     

Fixing the Meaning of 9/11: Hegemony,Coercion, and the Road to War in Iraq

As the costs of the invasion and occupation of Iraq mount, scholars have sought to explain how the United States came to launch this war in the first place. Many have focused on the “inflation” of the Iraq threat, and indeed the Bush administration did frame the national dialogue on Iraq. We maintain, however, that the failure of most leading Democrats to challenge the administration's case for war in 2002–2003 cannot be explained fully by the bully pulpit, Democrats' reputation for dovishness, or administration misrepresentations. Rather, we argue that leading Democrats were relatively silent in the run-up to war because they had been “rhetorically coerced”, unable to advance a politically sustainable set of arguments with which to oppose the war. The effective fixing of the meaning of the September 11 attacks in terms of the “War on Terror” substantially circumscribed political debate, and we explain why this discourse became dominant. The Bush administration then capitalized on the existing portrait of Saddam Hussein to bind Iraq tightly into the War on Terror and thereby silence leading Democrats and legitimate the war. The story of the road to war in Iraq is not only one of neoconservative hubris and manipulated intelligence. It is also the story of how political actors strove effectively after 9/11 to shape the nation's discourse of foreign affairs and of how the resulting dominant narratives structured foreign policy debate. Behind the seemingly natural War on Terror lurk political processes of meaning-making that narrowed the space for contestation over Iraq.     

Critical Commentary: The Assumptions of Democracy

The United States' project of democratisation in the Arab and Muslim world relies upon three core assumptions, revealed in Andrew S Natsios's account: the moderating power of democracy, a relationship between the nature of government and the condition of fear, and the tenacity of the US government in promoting democratic values in the region. Using the account of Iraq in Ambassador Edward Chaplin's article, this commentary seeks to show how each of these assumptions is contestable, and the likely consequences for the politics of the region if they do not conform to US expectations.     

Hizballah in Lebanon ‐ at the crossroads

Hizballah, the Party of God, burst onto the Lebanese scene in a whirlwind of violence at the end of 1983. Since then, it has become a power with considerable clout in the Shi'i community of Lebanon. At the end of the 1980s it reached the height of its strength when it gained control of most parts of the Shi'i concentrations in Lebanon. However, since then, Hizballah has faced a series of challenges which threaten its continued activity, if not its very existence, including the Ta'if agreement, the Middle East peace process and Iran's increasing inability to support Hizballah. In the face of these challenges, Hizballah appears pragmatic, willing, it seems, to abandon its goals, at least for the time being. This, however, raises a key question: Can the organization truly change course and turn away from the ideological commitment and path of violence that have characterized it to date? Or do those aspects indeed define the organization? It is still too early to lay odds on the organization's future, but it seems that it may be in jeopardy.     

Changing Turkish foreign policy towards Iraq: new tools of engagement

This article proposes that Turkey's foreign policy towards Iraq changed radically after 2007, in response to external challenges and domestic developments. The article analyses how Turkey's role in Iraq has changed on two different levels: firstly, in terms of increased activism and diplomatic engagement, and secondly, in terms of its increased economic involvement, using trade and foreign direct investment as foreign policy tools. These two different modes of engagement have transformed Turkey into a visible player in Iraq.     

Rwanda: Beyond ethnic conflict'

This paper ¹ explores some of the reasons for the failure of the international community to act decisively in preempting the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. These are rooted both in long-distant history and in the dynamics of post-Cold War international politics. Drawing on a decade of experience in Central Africa, the author looks critically at the widely accepted explanations of the genocide and its aftermath as 'simply tribal fighting', and considers the role of external agents - journalists and aid agencies alike - in fostering this view. The paper ends with a reflection on the complex challenges posed by 'reconciliation' in the wake of the genocide.