The Third Iraq War: Continuity and Change between 2004-2014

“This is a galvanizing moment for NATO and our partners”-US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel

President Obama is finalising plan to 'degrade and destroy' the Islamic State which he and other leaders refer to as ISIL in Iraq. However, there are hawkish voices demanding that air strikes should be broadened out into Syria and that would not mean involving Assad's permission though he is still officially head of state.

The call to go in and bomb IS in Syria where it has its base in and around Raqqa reflects the fact that despite the emergence of IS out of the Sunni militant groups, which were being backed until late 2013, the aim of US strategy in the longer term is to remove Assad in continuity with the demand made by early 2012.

The goals of the Second Iraq War in 2003, launched by the Bush administration, were energy security and to create a domino effect of democratisation across the region from Iraq into Syria so as to reduce US dependence upon Saudi Arabian oil in the period before the shale oil revolution in North America. 

Needless to say, the democratisation of Iraq by 2005 had got under way but in the context of a collapsed state. Sectarian and ethnic tensions shattered Iraq and the created chaos and conflicts that have gone on ever since: IS in Iraq could only gain ground in 2014 as Sunni Arabs were prepared to align with it.

Sunni Arabs were marginalised by the dominance of the Iraqi Shi'ites in Baghdad, who lean towards Iran, and the development of an ever more autonomous Kurdish region prepared to sell oil and strike oil contract deals with global energy giants ( such as ExxonMobil ) without the permission of the central government.

Yet the energy security issue remained unsolved because IS has gained what Obama euphemistically termed 'resources'. That means, of course, oil. From oil revenues IS could sustain attacks on the Kurdish oil rich region or even to surge south towards Baghdad or around it down further.

Such a disruption to the oil supply would create a severe increase in global oil prices at a time when the US and especially other NATO nations are experiencing very slow economic growth or have had stagnating economies in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

One reason the US is going in with air strikes, and is due to step them up with NATO nations playing a possible auxiliary role, is to give NATO nations a new sense of mission against a threat to the southern border and to gear it towards the main challenge of the 21st century: resource wars.

Such air strikes would be partly about showing NATO 'credibility' on the borders of southern Turkey and starting to recreate NATO definitively into an organisation that could use military power to defend energy interests and uphold its alliances in the Middle East by protecting Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Even though both these energy rich Gulf states could defend themselves with the state-of-the-art military equipment sold to them by the US, Britain and France, these powers are reluctant to be seen attacking other Sunni Muslims in lands not so far away lest it cause resentment among the people. 

Islamic State is a primarily a regional threat. Though the gory spectacles, mass killings of minorities and ambition to expand the Caliphate is real, the US and other western powers only started to act when it was clear IS posed a threat to the oil producing regions of Kurdistan, hitherto thought of as relatively secure.

That strategy against Islamic State mean rolling back IS in Iraq and broadening strikes into Syria too if necessary because the 'game plan' as regards it is still as it was before to impose a 'moderate' Muslim Brotherhood government on Damascus, overthrow Assad and check Iranian and Russian influence.

The last thing the US, Britain and France would want is to destroy IS only to empower and embolden Assad and Iran so they could realise the plan to build the 'Shi'ite Islamic' gas pipeline from the South Pars gas field to the Eastern Mediterranean.

Already Russia has a naval presence at the Syrian port of Tarsaus and permission to drill and exploit the gas reserves in the Syrian part of the Levant Basin. A gas pipeline linking Iranian gas through Syria as an alternative to the Qatari -Turkish one to the EU is this to be blocked off and thwarted at all costs.

In this sense there is a certain connection between the conflict in Ukraine and in Syria. If the US or NATO were to bomb positions in Syria, even if held by IS, this would be a violation of sovereignty by NATO far more than Russia's incursions into Eastern Ukraine and the backing given to "pro-Russia rebels".

Yet Syria's territorial sovereignty was effectively violated when Turkey started arming and training Sunni jihadists to go across the border to overthrow Assad and there is evidence Turkish forces in March 2014 had planned military incursions into northern Syria to protect the tomb of Shah Suleiman.

The protection of the site where the grandfather of the founder of the Ottoman Empire was under threat by ISIS was important to Erdogan who has pursued a neo-Ottoman strategy towards both Syria and Kurdistan, both former provinces before World War One and valuable for recreating Turkey as an east-west energy hub.

It is is clear, therefore, that energy security and control over oil and gas transit routes are the predominant factor in  contemporary geopolitical struggles in the Greater Middle East and the quest for both regional and global hegemony. Any account which omits mention of these factors ignores reality.

The Geopolitical and Energy Stakes behind the Israel-Gaza War of 2014.

'Barring some element that fundamentally changes the equation – an Israeli decision to re-occupy Gaza, the eruption of a third intifada on the West Bank – at some point both Israel and Hamas will be ready for mediators to help produce some negotiated ceasefire.'-America needs to end its obsession with trying to fix everything in Gaza-Aaron David Miller,

Israel is going for outright victory and to crush Hamas decisively as a political force. The absence of any geopolitical context to Aaron Miller's analysis is noticeable. Israel aims primarily to secure the Gaza Marine gas fields the better to stave off  a potential energy crisis and shore up Egypt which also lacks enough cheap gas.

Washington partly shares the aim of stable Egypt but it has been wary about the troubling division being opened up between Turkey and Qatar, on the one side, and Egypt and Israel and Saudi Arabia on the other. Growing tensions between these regional power alignments are blocking effective peace negotiations.

Hamas is backed by Qatar and Turkey because both have a geopolitical interest in being onside with their Muslim Brotherhood allies in Syria whom they hope will overthrow Assad and so push forward the construction of a Qatar Turkey pipeline. in rivalry to Israel's regional energy designs.

Israel, for its part, would not want the Sunni axis of influence to develop and for Qatar to be able to transit gas through to the Eastern Mediterranean before it has fully developed the Leviathan, Tamar and Gaza Marine gasfilelds. Nor would it want the rival pipeline between Iran, Iraq and Syria.

One reason Netanyahu was pleased that Russian diplomacy was able to avert  the prospect of a US and French military attack on Syria ( though he praised forceful US diplomacy for bringing Russia to negotiate ) was that Israel has no interest in Assad going so soon but in a continuation of the conflict.

Natanyahu was keen to urge the US to accept Russia's deal on Syria's chemical weapons back in 2013, even though his office officially denied it, because it was lukewarm about Washington's strategy in Syria which stood to benefit Qatar and Turkey more than it.

In turn, the coup in Egypt in 2013 was supported by Israel while the US was not so initially enthusiastic, with Kerry only reaffirming its full support and sometime later when the US had to accept it as an a fait accompli, partly because of the embarrassing scale of the killing but also so as not to anger Qatar and Turkey.

The US has backed off from being too involved in the Middle East since the wihdrawal of troops from Iraq. The shale revolution and the refocusing of diplomatic attention towards the Asia Pacific region in 2011 was part of that. So Israel has a free hand with which to crush Hamas.

The reason is that despite the vocal opposition to Israel's war in Gaza, few global or regional powers have any particular interest or ability to stop it. Israel wants to destroy Hamas while it has the chance with Egypt under Sisi sealing the border and frostier relations between Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas.
 
Israel has seized the opportunity to finish off Hamas the better to remove its rocket capacity which was feared as something that could be unleashed against Israel's gas infrastructure in the Eastern Mediterranean. Then, it would be able to use that to put the PA a position where it could break its alliance with Hamas.
 
The message would then be if the PA wants to benefit from the gas revenues it and the West Bank would be better off not alligning with Hamas because there would be no advantage anymore. Netanyahu's strategy is ruthless but it seems both the US and EU powers would have little to lose if he succeeded.

The need to hedge their bets as regards Israel's war on Gaza is partly about the EU's need for energy diversification. Israel could use the LNG supplies it is set to export in future to East Asia as well to to promote its regional security by supporting Egypt and Jordan which are seen as threatened by jihadists.

It's hard to see how Israel's war in Gaza could make it particularly less secure. The only possibility of that would be if ISIS were to gain a stronger foothold in Gaza at the expense of Hamas. Ex-IDF commanders have warned of this. Yet even then, that would not change much as Netanyahu is intent on a general 'war on terror'.

The Likud government makes no distinction between Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood or ISIS: all are jihadi Islamist fanatics at a regional and global level burning with a pyschopathological obsession with destroying both Israel and Western civilisation.

As a wealthy and largely rather effective 'national security state', Israel is not going to be realistically threatened. The last suicide bombing was in 2008. That threat has been largely averted. Hamas did not get much assistance from Iran between 2011-2014.

Part of that is connected with the sectarian divisions opened up and made worse by the Syrian conflict. It remains to be seen whether Hizbollah and Iran would put more priority on their struggle against Sunni jihadists than in starting to refocus on Israel should Israel prove too successful.

Yet that is very unlikely and the reality is that Netanyahu knows that he has the best chance Israel has had in years to compel a peace entirely on his terms, one that he refers to as a 'sustainable ceasefire' or a 'sustainable quiet', and that melds the agends of energy security with a a 'war on terror' one.

Irrespective of the humanitarian cost, which Israel blames on Hamas for continuing to attempt fire rockets as far as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the war is set to go on till it gain the regional security it wants which is why Netanyahu made it quite clear that ‘this will be a long operation’.