(This article was written by Maria Maalouf and appeared in Arab News. US wooing Iraqi PM in bid to reduce Iran's influence)

Next week’s visit to the US by Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani will take place in a very complex regional context. Israel’s ongoing military operations in the Gaza Strip have been exploited by pro-Iranian militias to carry out armed attacks against American military bases in Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile, the US wants to strengthen the capabilities of its partners in the region to confront terrorist organizations. This comes at a time when Washington is seeking to transform its military role in the Middle East, within the framework of focusing on the most potent threats to America’s security and its interests in the international arena.

Several issues will be on the agenda on Monday, when the Iraqi PM holds his first meeting at the White House since he assumed power in October 2022. He will meet US President Joe Biden and many American officials.

US Ambassador to Iraq Alina Romanowski said in an interview with Reuters last month that Daesh still poses a threat to the security and stability of the Iraqi state and that the mission of the military coalition led by the US to rout the group is not yet over. Therefore, Washington is focusing on building Iraq’s security capabilities to ensure the permanent defeat of Daesh and allow it to confront future terrorist threats. Since 2012, the US Congress has allocated more than $2 billion of Foreign Military Financing to build Iraqi security capabilities.

However, in January, Al-Sudani stated that the justification for the presence of the US-led coalition in Iraq had come to an end and that there was a need for dialogue with Washington to set a timetable for ending the mission of combating Daesh in Iraq. With the increase in American military strikes against armed militias in the country in response to the attacks on its bases since Oct. 7, pressure has increased on Al-Sudani to remove US troops from Iraq. This is despite the fact that their mission is today limited to providing support and training to Iraqi forces to enhance their capabilities to prevent the return of Daesh and protecting the Iraqi state against the threats of other terrorist organizations.

The US administration opposes any unplanned withdrawal from Iraq, as it fears a complete withdrawal may lead to the return of Daesh, in addition to making Iraq even more of an arena for Iranian influence, thus wasting the efforts that America has made in Iraq over the past two decades.

With the increase in armed operations by pro-Iranian Iraqi militias against American military bases in Iraq and Syria, Washington has, in recent months, urged Baghdad to make more efforts to prevent such attacks. The US administration has called for Iraq to increase security around all military bases that host American forces, prevent the militias from obtaining advanced weaponry, prosecute those who have carried out attacks against American bases and installations in Iraq, and respect the pledge it made to guarantee the security of American diplomatic and military facilities in the country.

The Biden administration also seeks to prevent Iran from using the Iraqi financial system to circumvent US sanctions. Therefore, it restricts Iraq’s access to its funds in America in an attempt to eliminate money laundering, which many trends indicate benefits both Iran and Syria. The US Federal Reserve imposes strict restrictions on international dollar transfers to Iraqi commercial banks.

Washington has also called on Baghdad to reform its financial system to prevent Iran from benefiting from it. Among the most prominent required reforms are improving the oversight of monetary transfers, preventing the financing of Iranian-backed militias and enhancing transparency in the economic system. The Iraqi government has pledged to implement these reforms but little progress has been made so far. The US is pressuring the Baghdad government to act as soon as possible.

The multiple visits exchanged between American and Iraqi officials reveal that Iraq is still a priority in US foreign policy and that it is the cornerstone of regional stability. The Biden administration is focusing on consolidating relations with Baghdad and moving their bilateral relations into a permanent strategic security partnership, as Iraq remains one of the most essential battlefields against terrorism.

America’s search for a stable strategic partnership with Iraq comes within the framework of its policy to limit Iranian influence, which Washington sees as one of the key threats to its strategic interests in the region.

Maria Maalouf is a Senior Media Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Hermann Tertsch and appeared in El Debate. Sánchez puede ser mucho peor)

The ferocious campaign against the VOX party, which had its most intense moments between the municipal and the general elections, has not subsided in intensity; it has changed in its forms. When everyone should by now have accepted its failure.

The objective was to finish off this party, and what it has achieved is to demonstrate that a very firm electoral floor has already consolidated and does not give way even under the most adverse conditions possible.

Neither with 90% of the media announcing its disappearance and inventing division, internal discord and desertions, nor with the various private campaigns of assorted enemies, has the desired effect been produced.

Few parties outside the government would have withstood so firmly a campaign so barbaric and intense — one that there has not been in Spain even against parties that defend terrorism.

That does not mean it did no damage. Some of the damage was a boomerang. Because the dent of the asphyxiating harassment of VOX was enough to do great harm to Núñez Feijóo, so much as to deny him the government.

And it was precisely the campaign of the People’s Party and its media that demanded VOX give the PP the majority the latter claimed to have and never had. The self-inflicted defeat, aimed at VOX’s backside, will go down in the annals of blunders in electoral-strategy design.

Never has a party that had won the elections in alliance devoted itself so intensely to harming its only possible ally, to the point of depriving itself of victory.

Not everyone in the other parties has understood this, and of course there are many in several of them, on left and right, who dream of a Spain without VOX, whether by harassment and demolition or by outlawing it.

It is quite possible that there are fools in the PP to whom the outlawing of VOX would seem convenient.

Let them be careful, because if Sánchez goes off to the Valley of the Fallen to do a photo shoot among skulls and bones, he does so, of course, to use the dead in the most miserable way for his propaganda.

But also to visualize that, faced with the catastrophe his government confronts — with a mountain of unheard-of corruption scandals and with Sánchez’s own wife, Begoña Gómez, at the center of the whole plot — he is preparing for a total confrontation with such a civil-war character that it will already be a civil war, though for the moment a cold one.

The propaganda machinery set in motion for the visit to the Valley of the Fallen, which provided from a single official source the images of Sánchez and company advancing through the basilica and the tunnels like conquerors and owners, makes the warlike language clear.

Meanwhile, the friendly media, the most militant ones and the others of more surreptitious propaganda, were again setting their sights on VOX and the «concord laws», which in two regions where this party governs with the PP have replaced the «democratic memory laws» of the Popular Front-style, revanchist sectarianism.

In reality, those concord laws merely recover a spirit of the Transition that treats equally the sides of a war they consider a common tragedy of all Spaniards.

This spirit was abolished, prohibited by Zapatero as soon as he came to government after the 11-M bombings. And today it is a persecuted spirit, because for today’s Popular Front-ists, for the government and all the media of the left’s hegemonic lies, there is only one impeccable side and one demonic side.

The media all ring out that this conflict is because VOX denies relatives the right to recover the bodies of the war’s victims. Which is a miserable lie, whoever the announcer saying it may be. VOX is not against a dignified burial for those who remain in a mass grave. It defends that right for all. For the victims of the Popular Front and for the Nationalist ones, whose remains are often reburied or abandoned in the grave when the Democratic Memory crews identify them as «Francoists».

VOX is against the Democratic Memory Law that serves to finance an immense network of rackets of civil-war revanchism. But above all because it is a totalitarian law that wants to divide and set Spaniards against each other even more, and to impose lies as official and obligatory truths, and to prohibit, persecute and punish truths because they are not to power’s liking.

Sánchez can use that law for a head-on clash that makes it impossible to debate and investigate all the countless crimes of the various criminal schemes developed under his government.

The radical application of Sánchez’s Democratic Memory Law could turn it into something very similar to that Law Against Fascism that the criminal Nicolás Maduro and the no less criminal Delcy Rodríguez pulled out of their sleeve — both with very close contacts with the Spanish government through Rodríguez Zapatero.

That law, just passed by the narco-communist dictatorship, gives entirely free rein to seize, fine and detain — and, in the case of Venezuela, to torture and murder — in absolute arbitrariness, anyone suspected of fascism, of sympathies with conservative forces, or of criticism of Bolivarian socialism.

It is rightly said that the immense majority of Spaniards no longer respond to the left’s lures with hackneyed campaigns against fascism or Francoism. That is true.

But an absolutely incompetent opposition has allowed and helped to consolidate the PSOE’s maneuver of regime change to impose laws with brutal mechanisms of coercion.

They are laws so that a dictator or a regime with an unscrupulous autocrat can have all the power, of absolutely arbitrary use, to persecute the entire opposition it declares an enemy.

They are laws against freedom, against the truth and for dictatorship. And with a tsunami of corruption cases and now manifest diversions, embezzlement of national and European funds that reach his government and his own home, Sánchez is capable of anything.

If he has no serious and convincing warnings to dissuade him, he is capable of trying to threaten all of society in order to keep power, which is now the only thing that grants impunity to himself, to his wife and to that entire council of ministers already under a hundred thousand suspicions. Sánchez may be close to being much worse than until now.

Hermann Tertsch is a Distinguished Fellow (Honorary) at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in Warrior Maven. “Nuclear War” Book & Jacobson’s Nuclear Confusion)

The new book “Nuclear War” by Annie Jacobson has received multiple rave reviews. It portrays a scenario in which billions of people die within three days of a North Korean strike on the US with two nuclear warheads. The problem? The US deterrent policy that Jacobsen believes is based on nuclear war fighting, and which relies on an automatic launch on warning strategy if Washington discovers a missile has been launched at the United States.

The nuclear Armageddon story starts with North Korea launching a one megaton bomb that hits the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, described as a “bolt-out-of-the blue strike” for which the US is unprepared. Another nuclear weapon takes out a nuclear power plant in California. The United States immediately responds with a launch of 82 ICBMs at the DPRK but inside a short six-minute window within which the US President supposedly must decide whether and how to retaliate.

Jacobson also argues the US has to use our ICBMs because submarine-based missiles cannot be launched to fit within the six-minute window. And since as she claims, Russia’s early warning satellite and radar system are, unfortunately, not very good, and since the US ICBM range is inadequate to hit North Korea without going over Russia, Moscow incorrectly believes that the US retaliatory missile launch is on its way toward Russia, not North Korea.

Believing that the US launch is a first strike against Russia and Putin having adopted a new policy of “launch on warning of an attack,” Jacobson concludes that “Putin will not wait” for confirmation that nuclear warheads have landed on Russia soil. Russia will then launch a massive nuclear strike on the United States. And this would in turn push the United States into attacking Russia with its on-alert remaining nuclear force [which at the start of the war numbered some 1800 strategic nuclear warheads according to Jacobsen.]

The resulting tens of millions of immediate deaths would then be followed by the breakdown of food and energy supplies and the subsequent death of additional hundreds of millions of Americans and Russians. Even worse, the 300 billion pounds of soot produced by the massive fires brings with it “nuclear winter”, as the sun’s warming rays are blocked out from reaching the earth’s surface. The death of billions of people worldwide results.

In a number of interviews with Vanity Fair and Mother Jones, for example, and in reviews by the New York Times and the Cyber Brief, Jacobson argues that the US has a plan to conduct nuclear war fighting which is automatic and set down as a series of previously adopted requirements that leave US officials little leeway to change the US response.

Jacobson also say that one person, the President of the United States, can make the decision to destroy the world, and can do so even without very much information. And she warns, the military “war mongers” have a very “aggressive culture” that has a predilection to “jam” the President toward a “quickly launching a massive retaliatory strike.”

She argues that any Presidential candidate must therefore be assessed on whether that person is stable and not erratic, including as one reviewer noted, an “unsteady commander should not be in charge.” And this is really important, as the country is “at the brink” of possible nuclear war, the book argues. Not coincidentally, the title of a new series of essays being published by the New York Time is “At the Brink,” which in turn was initiated as a means of fully exploring the nuclear disarmament issues raised by the “Oppenheimer” movie.

Unfortunately, the scenario adopted by Jacobson is a “cooked the books” argument. Her book is filled with seriously misunderstood US policy prescriptions, and a gross failure to understand the basics of nuclear deterrence. She asserts nuclear weapons do not make us strong, and need to be significantly reduced in importance, and instead of modernization the US should seek arms control and disarmament.

Not only that, the scenario adopted doesn’t make any strategic sense as well. Why would North Korea just attack the US with two nuclear warheads, knowing full well the US could turn the DPRK into a parking lot?

While admitting that nuclear deterrence has worked perfectly for roughly 75 years, the book warns deterrence might definitely fail and if it fails, any use of nuclear weapons, no matter how small, will result in all out nuclear war. Jacobson also argues that all US previous military war-gaming, going through multiple scenarios of how nuclear weapons might be used, universally ends in general nuclear war. And thus, she concludes, the US policy of “mutual assured destruction” often referenced as “MAD” is itself “mad” and not reliable as a deterrent strategy!

She is wrong on all counts. The US however does not have a “MAD” nuclear strategy and does not have an automatic series of retaliatory strikes to carry out. The US also does not have a launch on warning strategy or policy, although she correctly notes that Russia does. Thus, the US President does not have to respond within six minutes which seems to be based on the assumption that the US does indeed have a “launch on warning” deterrent strategy.

Furthermore, the US would first try and shoot down the incoming North Korean warhead with its GBI or ground-based interceptors, or if available, a better system that is now being discussed and was unanimously recommended by the Strategic Posture Commission.

Jacobson does have the US shoot four interceptors at the incoming warhead, but the result is rigged: they all miss. She references Dr. Ted Postol of MIT that the US missile defense system is only successful 50% of time even in “scripted tests” but in the real world “cannot be effective” says Jacobson and would have almost a zero chance of intercepting a ballistic missile warhead.

However, in fact the GBI system and all national and theater missile defense systems deployed by the United States actually have been successful in nearly 84% of all tests. And while the GBI deployments in Alaska and California number only 44, that small deployment has been due in large part to disarmament advocates that have opposed all US national missile defenses going back to the 1972 ABM treaty.

Dr. Postol however has also been totally wrong about the high success of the Israeli Iron Dome missile defense that Jacobson explains many Americans with whom she has spoken believe the US can duplicate. The Iron Dome missile defense has indeed shot down an estimated 90% of Hamas and Hezbollah missile launches aimed at Israeli settlements.

This Iron Dome success rate was ridiculed by Dr. Postol as unproven. He explained that the Israelis did not suffer casualties but not due to the effectiveness of missile defense but because Israelis learned to run faster to the shelters. Noted Israeli missile defense expert Dr. Uzi Rubin commented that Postol’s “fortune cookie” analysis was ridiculous and was based on an animus toward missile defense rather than a reliance upon scientific fact.

Apart from trying to intercept the incoming NK warhead, for some reason Jacobson rushes the President to fire back and only with land-based ICBMs. However, there is no reason for the President to respond within a 6 minutes window. Even if NK launched a nuclear missile from a submarine and from just off the coast of North Carolina, for example, the warhead could arrive at the Pentagon much more quickly than from an ICBM, but again, what response by the US would require a near immediate Presidential launch decision, especially when no further North Korean missile launches have been detected?

Furthermore, a much more likely US retaliatory response could be to either launch a SLBM from the Pacific from a US Ohio class submarine. Or if available, a Navy submarine or ship based nuclear armed theater cruise missile, (SLCM-N), a technology development that was a top recommendation of the 2023 Strategic Posture Review Commission.

In these scenarios, there would be no over-flight of Russia territory, the US could still destroy key North Korean targets promptly, including the NK leadership, and would be a relatively limited response. A reasonable result? The North Korean launches do not continue. Armageddon does not ensue.

Contrary to what Jacobson assumes, US deterrent strategy is not about “war fighting” but is to ensure the US is able to credibly respond to any adversary launch of nuclear weapons against the United States and its allies, a capability to deter being required across the spectrum of conflict. Such capability is not a “plan for nuclear war” or a “catalyst for Armageddon” as claimed.

It is true that Putin has appeared to have adopted a launch-on warning strategy. But even worse is that his strategy of “escalate to de-escalate” has also been adopted by the Russian leader. Here Jacobsen gets totally confused. It is not as she claims the strategy of the United States to use nuclear weapons in a conventional conflict. In fact, the US military has repeatedly underscored that the enemy introduction of nuclear weapons into a conventional conflict results in “nothing holds”—meaning our conventional war strategies of victory would fail.

And while indeed it was General John Hyten who brought this Russian strategy to our attention, Jacobson mangles the facts. The US nuclear umbrella and extended deterrence over our NATO and Western Pacific allies are not an aggressive and unwarranted “escalate” strategy.

General Hyten warned years ago “escalate to de-escalate” is a Russian not an American strategy. For example, Moscow attacks conventionally, as they did Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. And then if faced with a counterattack which might succeed, Moscow threatens the limited use of battlefield nuclear weapons which former President Yeltsin ordered Russia to develop in 1999. The objective? To get the US to stand down and not come to the defense of an ally attacked by Russia.

Thus, the Russian “escalate to de-escalate” policy is actually an “escalate to win” strategy, as Dr. Brad Roberts has explained. The policy is to secure the fruits of aggression and fundamentally eliminate the US conventional and extended nuclear umbrella.

When during the Cold War, the US would bring its nuclear capability to central Europe if faced with a conventional strike through the Fulda Gap by the Warsaw Pact nations, it was to prevent aggression and war in the first place, not to help aggression succeed.

In conclusion, the scenario offered by Annie Jacobson will scare the uninformed. And if believed might undermine the American public’s support for our nuclear deterrent.

In particular the story is a rigged critic on American ICBMs and Missile Defenses, the two bet noirs the disarmament community has been trying to kill for nearly the past half century.

Jacobson repeats all the criticisms about these systems and weaves them into a threadbare doomsday tapestry. We are told ICBMs can be launched in minutes; ICBMs don’t have adequate range and thus have to fly-over Russia; ICBMs are first strike weapons; ICBMs will end the world; ICBMs cannot be recalled.

Indeed, ICBMs can be promptly launched but that is a positive attribute because it tells an enemy that their key assets cannot remain in a sanctuary free from being destroyed. Given these assets are what they value most, holding such valuable assets at risk is the central plank of US deterrent policy through at least 14 Presidential administrations.

In the 75 years of the nuclear age, no ballistic missile has been launched at the USA. And no launch committee meeting has ever been convened at Strategic Command to evaluate such a launch.

And no President has ever had to decide to launch an ICBM or SLBM.

To eliminate deterrence, or weaken it, without replacing the system with something equally effective, would be a dereliction of duty.

And could indeed put the lives of billions of folks on this planet at risk.

Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.