By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 9 December 2024
Bashar al-Assad Falls
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Tag Archives: chemical weapons
A Flawed Film Brings Attention to the Soviet Terror-Famine in Ukraine
The Trouble With “Ending Forever Wars”
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 12 August 2021
In early July, President Joe Biden confirmed his intention to withdraw all American troops from Afghanistan by September 2021. Biden cited a February 2020 U.S. “agreement” with the Taliban that he had “inherited” from the Trump administration. In truth, President Donald Trump had made no agreement. He had already begun pulling troops out by October 2019 and signed a fig leaf to cover his unconditional withdrawal.
Biden reassessed other Trump policies and could have reassessed this one, not least since the Taliban were in violation even of their vague paper promises — most notably on their commitment to deny space to al Qaeda and negotiate peace in good faith. The truth is that Biden is ideologically committed, as Barack Obama and Trump were, to ending American involvement in “forever wars.” Regardless, this does not mean those wars end or the threats that drew the United States in actually go away. Continue reading
The CIA and Iraq: Intelligence Failures, Media Successes
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 28 December 2019
In a long article last week, I looked at why the U.S. ran a formal occupation of Iraq for fourteen months after the fall of Saddam Husayn in April 2003, given that there had been an explicit pre-invasion decision not to have an occupation government. The short answer is that the occupation was installed through deception by the State Department, supported by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). State and CIA had argued for a protracted occupation in the Situation Room debates in 2002, but President George W. Bush had sided with the Pentagon, which advocated a rapid transfer of power to Iraqis. Having lost in the formal inter-agency process, the State Department succeeded by subversion in getting its way on the ground in Iraq. The disaster this caused in the mismanagement of post-Saddam Iraq was, as the article explained in detail, only the most serious impact of the toxic schism between State/CIA and the Pentagon, a factor whose import is difficult to overstate when examining how the Bush administration functioned. (This feud also at times drew in the Vice President’s Office, which tended to support the Pentagon.)
The Intelligence Value of the Iraqi National Congress
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 27 December 2019
The Iraqi National Congress (INC), the umbrella group for the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Husayn from the 1990s up to 2003, has been immensely controversial, mostly because of its leader, Ahmad Chalabi, against whom the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and State Department waged a bitter bureaucratic war, a lot of it in the press, getting into circulation stories of INC trickery—possibly on behalf of Iran—being behind the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq.
Why Was There Ever An American Occupation of Iraq?
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 22 December 2019
Douglas Feith was the U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2001 to 2005, one of the most senior positions at the Pentagon during one of the most consequential periods in recent history, covering the 11 September 2001 atrocities and early phase of the U.S.-led response. Feith later wrote a highly illuminating memoir, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, which tried to drain some of the hysteria out of the public “debate” about the Iraq dimension of the U.S. policy in particular by explaining the internal arguments in the Bush administration leading up to the decision to finish with Saddam Husayn in 2003, and trying to set those arguments in their proper historical context, both in relation to Iraq—where “the war” had begun twelve years earlier—and the altered American threat perceptions in the shadow of 9/11. Unlike a lot of the gossipy tomes that emerged from former officials, Feith’s book is notably light on opinion and contains reams of declassified documents so readers can check his analysis against the source material. One of Feith’s key judgments is that “the chief mistake was maintaining an occupation government in Iraq for over a year”.[1] As Feith explains in great detail in the book, this was never supposed to happen. So how did it?
The Memoir of a British Spy in Al-Qaeda
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 8 July 2019
This article was originally published at the European Eye on Radicalization
The main issue that Nine Lives has to overcome is the one that has attended Aimen Dean (a pseudonym) since he went public in March 2015 with an interview he gave to the BBC, claiming he had been a British spy within Al-Qaeda between 1998 and 2006. That issue is overcoming the doubts about his story. Nine Lives goes a long way to solving this by bringing in Paul Cruickshank, the editor-in-chief of CTC Sentinel, one of the premier academic resources in the terrorism field, and Tim Lister, a terrorism-focused journalist with CNN, as co-authors. As well as helping structure the book from Dean’s memories, the two co-authors note they had been able to “corroborate key details” that convinced them: “In the years immediately leading up to and following 9/11, Aimen Dean was by far the most important spy the West had inside al-Qaeda”.
Continue readingWhat Captured ISIS Jihadists Tell Us About the Group
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 2 December 2018
An Islamic State poster near al-Sukhna in the eastern Homs desert, Syria, August 2017 (source)
Over the past week, two members of the Islamic State (IS) have been arrested—a rarity in itself during the Coalition campaign against the group—and both in different ways give a glimpse of archetypes that have made up the organisation, from its inception to its expansion into Syria. Continue reading
The Failure of the United Nations in Syria
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 14 May 2018
United Nations in East Ghouta, Syria (image source)
At best, the United Nations has been impotent as Syria was destroyed. But when the U.N.’s role is examined more closely it looks more like a collaborator, than a bystander, to that destruction. Continue reading
The Strikes in Syria and America’s Path Forward
A version of this article was published in CapX
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) and James Snell on 8 May 2018
The Barzeh chemical weapons facility in Damascus, Syria, demolished by U.S. cruise missiles on 14 April 2018 (image source)
The United States and its allies, Britain and France, launched over 100 missiles at the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad in the early hours of 14 April. This was retaliation for the regime’s use of poison gas in the town of Douma, east of the capital, Damascus, exactly a week earlier, which massacred at least 43 people and wounded 500 more. The military strikes were an important signal and will likely be some deterrent against the future use of chemical weapons in Syria, but ultimately this was another missed opportunity by the West to meaningfully affect the course of the war. Continue reading
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