http://libertyunyielding.com/2016/10/16/another-missile-attack-u-s-warships-weirdest-wars-gropes-next-gear/
Another missile attack on U.S. warships, as this weirdest of wars
gropes for the next gear
By J.E. Dyer October 16, 2016October 17, 2016
Coalition troops mass outside Mosul, October 2016. (Image: Screen grab
of Wochit video, YouTube)
The place to start in bringing you this update is with a report from
early September. The gist of the report is that Houthi rebels and
Iraqi “militias” – that is, the Iraqi Shias trained and supported by
Iran – agreed to train together in Yemen.
The linking entity between the two groups is, of course, the Iranian Qods Force.
This doesn’t necessarily mean anything specific about who literally
manned the Iran-supplied cruise missile systems that were used to
attack the UAE-leased HSV-2 Swift on 1 October, and make attempts
against U.S. warships on 9, 12, and now 15 October. That’s not the
point.
The point is that Iran is fighting regionally, with an interlinked
regional strategy, and not just in little boresighted tactical pockets
here and there.
As it might be put in military jargon, Iran is “fighting the whole
theater.” That means Iran is developing the entire area as a battle
space, viewing it in terms of territorial, logistic, and
weapons-defined dimensions, and not just political or ideological
ones. This, in turn, is as good a reason as any to get our heads
around the reality that this is a real war, and it’s already started.
Iran is training and backing the instigators of the civil war in
Yemen. Without the Houthis, there would be no civil war. There would
be no Saudi intervention, and nothing like the security alarms being
felt by the other Gulf Arabs, or on the Horn of Africa.
And Iran is training and backing the Iraqi militias that are massing,
with Sunni Iraqi National troops and Kurdish forces, to retake Mosul
from ISIS – a tremendous battle whose overture began on Saturday, and
whose main effort has reportedly just started. These same militias
are the ones that fought to retake Iraq’s Diyala Province from ISIS,
and then Tikrit, Ramadi, and Fallujah.
Iran is also backing Qods-trained forces fighting alongside Assad in
Syria, as well as sponsoring Assad directly, and backing Hezbollah.
Hezbollah, in turn, is assisting in Yemen with the Houthis.
But the focus of this update will be on Yemen and her environs, and Mosul.
The third missile attack on U.S. warships
On Saturday 15 October, reports emerged that USS Mason (DDG-87) had
fought off yet another missile attack launched from the Yemeni coast,
apparently late on 15 October. It’s not quite clear if Mason had to
use missiles to shoot down an incoming missile; one report alluded to
Mason firing, but others said the destroyer deployed countermeasures,
which could mean the incoming missile was deflected with a decoy or
chaff.
USS Mason in less interesting times — September 2016, underway for a
Gulf exercise. (Image: USN, MC1 Blake Midnight)
In any case, this would make the third time the U.S. warships have
been fired at. What hasn’t been apparent to most Westerners is what
was going on before all this started. And you won’t regret taking a
moment to get up to speed. This puts the events in perspective.
For our purposes there’s no need to go back for years, or even months.
Many readers will be aware that the Arab coalition has been using the
Eritrean port of Assab for logistics support for a little over a year.
UAE leased the port for this purpose starting in 2015. (Links below.)
Arabs making major muscle movements around the Bab El-Mandeb
The use of ports in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden has actually been a
drama and source of regional shake-ups; when the Saudis initiated
their intervention in Yemen, the Arab coalition was kicked out of
Djibouti (which they had been able to use for years as participants in
the antipiracy coalition), and thus sought other accommodations.
Besides the UAE arrangement with Assab, the emirate of Dubai – with
the assistance and approval of the Saudis, and even, apparently, the
Egyptians – just contracted in September 2016 to manage the port of
Berbera in Somaliland. This is expected to give the Arab coalition
tacit permission to use the port for logistics.
Somaliland fancies itself an independent nation (and really,
considering the inability of Mogadishu to exercise real control of it,
might as well be one). Dubai Ports World (DPW) making agreements
directly with the government of Somaliland is a significant political
move, portending realignments in geopolitical patronage and
expectations, if not necessarily wholesale destabilization. The Gulf
Arabs, in making these port arrangements for military and influence
purposes, are cutting a new political swath in northeastern Africa,
courtesy of the civil war in Yemen.
Iran isn’t going to take that sitting down. She didn’t help the
Houthis start the war so that the Sunni Arabs could take advantage of
it.
There’s a lot going on behind the scenes, but the big kinetic event
preceding the missile attack on HSV-2, which occurred 1 October, was
an attack by the Houthis on the port of Assab in Eritrea, and the
nearby airport. This raid, which has been confirmed by multiple
sources in the region, was mounted on 19 September.
Area of Houthi raid on Assab, Eritrea, 19 Sep. For overview, see map
below. (Google map; author annotation)
There is also a report that 5,000 “Yemeni militants” – in this case,
Sunni sympathizers of the officially recognized Hadi government and
its Saudi backers – were taken to Eritrea at the same time, to train
for operations in support of the Saudis and the Hadi government.
Without discounting that report, I don’t know of anything to verify
it. Nor is it quite as important as the Houthi raid on Assab.
The latter certainly explains why HSV-2 and other UAE or Saudi vessels
would have been conducting military operations off the Houthi-held
coast in the days afterward.
It was into this fray that the U.S. deployed our warships – after the
attack on HSV-2.
Operational overview of recent events off Yemen. (Google map; author annotation)
And here’s an important point that hasn’t really been highlighted.
The ships that send the biggest signal about our presence – whether we
intend that signal or not – aren’t the USS Mason. They’re the USS
Ponce (AFSB(I)-15) – the former amphibious transport dock now
operating as a unique afloat forward staging base, with a helicopter
contingent embarked – and USS San Antonio (LPD-17), which is still an
amphibious transport dock ship, and has a bunch of U.S. Marines from
the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (22 MEU) embarked.
Ponce apparently wasn’t in the Bab El-Mandeb area when HSV-2 was
attacked on 1 October, although San Antonio may have been. San
Antonio had transited the Strait of Hormuz on 24 September, and could
have arrived near Bab El-Mandeb/Djibouti by 26-27 September. Ponce
reportedly got underway from homeport – Manama, Bahrain – on 28
September, and held a steel beach picnic, obviously in a non-alerted
state, on 29 or 30 September.
For context, recall that the Houthi attack on Assab, Eritrea, took
place 19 September. HSV-2 was attacked on 1 October, and according to
news reports, USS Ponce deployed to the hot area after the attack,
along with the destroyers USS Mason and USS Nitze, heading for the
coast of Yemen in the same area where HSV-2 was attacked.
Then, on 8 October, the Saudi coalition conducted an air strike on the
funeral home in Yemen, in which some 140 people were killed.
So, if you were Iran or the Houthis, you’d have good reason to suppose
that the U.S., by sending in these ships, had some intention of
actively backing the Arab coalition and possibly intervening.
On 9 October, when the first missiles were launched at the U.S.
warships, USS San Antonio was reported to be on-scene with the others
(Mason, Nitze, and Ponce).
The point here is not that there are no circumstances in which we
might justifiably want to intervene. The point is that it really
looks like we have once again backed unwarily, with no apparent plan,
into someone else’s war, and now they’re torqued off about it.
(This next update from a widely read Facebook account is unconfirmed
by a corroborating source, but it indicates that F-16s from Aviano, in
northern Italy, have deployed to Djibouti within the last few days.
It isn’t clear if this was a previously scheduled deployment.)
If we’re going to actually do something about the situation in Yemen,
it sure is well past time for the president to be talking to Congress
about that. And if he has done so, and Congress is publicly mute on
the topic, then that’s a whole other can of worms. But the bottom
line is that this is increasingly just…ridiculous.
The American people have a right to know why our ships are sitting off
the coast of Yemen, looking like a big provocation to the most
ill-behaved terror-sponsoring despotism on earth, while doing no one
will say what, and having missiles fired at them every few days.
“Gulf of Tonkin” certainly comes to mind here. But the real concern
is that some new ground is being plowed, and a whole new touchstone of
geopolitics and military misadventure is being generated.
Mosul
Which brings us to the just-launched action in Mosul. The
shortsightedness of the Western media is really a handicap here. It
has obscured the most important aspect of the fight for Mosul, which
is that it’s a clash of interests between Iran and Turkey. And our
troops are smack dab in the middle of it.
Iran, as mentioned already, is fighting the whole theater now. The
mullahs and their military leaders see it as an interrelated
region-wide battle space. Whatever they are doing in one part of the
theater is consciously meant to affect the other parts of it. So the
battle for Mosul may not be the main thing on their minds when they
look at U.S. warships in the Red Sea – but it is on their minds. It’s
a grave mistake to ignore that (or its potential implications for the
Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, for that matter).
The U.S., meanwhile, is behaving as if all the different moving parts
in the region are separable. We seem to not understand that the
various armed actors there have transformative geostrategic goals
they’re trying to achieve. They’re not just motivated by political
abstractions, as the Obama administration seems to be. (A good
example is Aleppo, where the Russia-led coalition is fighting an
actual “war,” and gradually changing the facts on the ground, while
the U.S. keeps talking about atrocities and the possibility of no-fly
zones as if none of that reality on the ground is real.)
This matters because Iran’s reasons to try to undermine –and now snipe
at – the U.S. are amplified by every Iranian fight that Tehran
perceives we’re both in. I note that this multidimensional thinking
is a talent Russia has as well. Moscow and Tehran may be partners in
various enterprises, but they’re also circling and jockeying against
each other, which just makes it all extra fun.
For decades, the U.S. spent most of our time flailing and barely
holding on in such situations, except for brief interludes of will,
when we just overrode these regional dynamics with superior power.
That’s not an option anymore, and Donald Trump can’t bring it back.
Too much of the substructure of our superior power has been dismantled
now.
It’s essential to understand that we have military force deployed into
the whole network of local fights that animate the theater aspirations
of Iran (and Russia). But our forces in any one place are too limited
to prevail against the concerted force that can pose a threat to them.
That calculus isn’t going to change in our favor, because we don’t
have a plan. Obama is just offering our military up to the plans of
others.
Thus, we find ourselves playing the overture to the battle for Mosul,
without taking into account what the real implication of the battle
is.
The real implication is who will control the great city that dominates
all of northern Iraq, if ISIS will not. It isn’t going to be Baghdad
or the Kurds. They’re too weak to conquer Mosul, impose their will,
and make it stick.
Homemade tanks to be used by Peshmerga troops in the battle for Mosul.
(Images, top to bottom: Screen grab of TomoNews video, YouTube; screen
grab of TomoNews video, YouTube; Twitter, PeshmergaEU via Daily Mail)
That’s why Iran has been angling for months now to be in this fight.
It’s why many of the Kurds in northern Iraq have become resistant to
Iranian encroachments and influence. It’s why Russia has been arming
the Kurds directly for months – and it’s why Turkey has suddenly
decided that the 93-year-old Treaty of Lausanne and its provision for
modern Turkey’s border were all screwed up, and need to be reworked,
and meanwhile Turkey needs to participate in the fight for Mosul too.
If the battle didn’t promise to be so horrific, and no laughing
matter, it would be almost funny that the entire “Atlantic West,” as
Russia likes to call us, sees it in a single, simplistic dimension as
a battle to kick ISIS out.
Obama has chosen to be there in pieces and parts, without an
overarching strategic objective. That’s the crime against responsible
state policy.
It’s Sunday, 16 October, in the U.S., and just a couple of hours ago,
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the fight has begun.
As of early Sunday, local reporting in Iraq indicated that coalition
aircraft, led by the U.S., had ramped up air attacks significantly in
the last 48 hours.
The Iraqi national forces dropped thousands of leaflets on Mosul on
Saturday, advising residents that an all-out assault is imminent.
The U.S. has reportedly been pounding ISIS positions in eastern Mosul
with artillery since Saturday evening (yes, we have artillery in
country, to go with all those boots that aren’t on the ground there,
and we’re using it to start the fight).
And a coalition of 30,000 troops has massed on three sides of the
city: Kurds, Shia militias backed by Iran, Sunni fighters backed by
Turkey, Iraqi National Army troops, and embedded advisers from the
U.S. and other Western coalition partners (e.g., Canada and France).
Mosul is starting out messy
It could hardly be less auspicious. Besides the very real concern
about how ISIS has the place booby-trapped, and the possibility that
chemical agents will be used against the populace and the attacking
coalition, the battle is starting with serious disagreements among
those purporting to all be on the same side.
One of them is a reported decision by “the U.S. coalition” to allow
ISIS fighters safe passage out of the city, if they’ll go to Syria.
This is a talking point being flogged by the Russians; its veracity
hasn’t been confirmed. It may be that the U.S. is encouraging Iraq to
let fighters leave Mosul if they will give up their positions
peacefully – which the Assad regime has done repeatedly in Syria, with
rebel fighters of various stripes.
But since Obama’s public posture on these matters is invariably coy
and uncommunicative, we don’t have a way to judge what’s really going
on. So there’s a whole media-sphere out there in which the Russian
talking point is holy writ, and everyone believes it – and believes
the U.S. is cynically trying to undermine the Russian coalition by
flooding Syria with ISIS thugs.
For what it’s worth, the Al-Abadi government in Baghdad has said it
won’t allow ISIS fighters to flee to Syria.
Another, equally problematic source of friction is the vertical
pervasiveness of distrust among the 30,000 soldiers in the coalition
to liberate Mosul. The natural distrust of the Kurds for the
Turkey-backed Sunni units has gotten most of the press in the last
couple of weeks. But the Kurds are also divided as to how they feel
about Iran: some of them OK with Iran’s role, and others determined
not to accept it.
Inside Mosul, the highest-profile resistance organization has sworn to
treat all Turkish-backed forces just as if they were ISIS. So we’ve
got that going for us.
And Turkey’s Erdogan has given the Iraqi government every reason to be
distrustful of his intentions, by being his usual charming self.
But there’s more. The Iran-backed Shias are full of zeal about the
eschatological import of what they’re doing. And the meaning of that
for their determination to stir up centuries-old grievances mustn’t be
overlooked.
A local observer made this report on the Islamic holiday of Ashura,
which fell on 12 October this year, noting that a Shia factional
leader in Iraq made quite a bloodthirsty call against Sunnis in his
Ashura commemoration. Shias hold Sunnis responsible for the death of
Imam Hussein some 1,400 years ago, and the Shia leader related the
Ashura remembrance of his death specifically to the battle for Mosul,
implying clearly that Shias in the fight should be seeking revenge
against all Sunnis (i.e., not just ISIS).
The author of the post asks why the Americans don’t see that we have
aligned ourselves with Iran-backed Shias slavering for Iraqi Sunni
blood.
At the same time, Russia and Iran accuse us of unleashing vicious
Sunnis to make war on them.
And don’t forget: that’s what Iran says we are doing, sitting off the
coast of Yemen.
We backed into this without a plan. That’s why it’s so bad
You, Joe and Jane American, probably didn’t think you were doing any
of this. I certainly didn’t.
No situation is actually “impossible.” But for an outside,
expeditionary, sheriff-role power like the United States, a situation
like this one requires irreducible purpose, firm will, and practical
judgment. All three are lacking in our posture in the region today.
The one overriding principle is not that we should never “get into a
land war in Asia” – although that’s very rarely a good idea.
The overriding principle is that we must never use force without
having a decisive, well-defined objective of our own. We can respect
other nations’ objectives. We should never, ever subordinate our own
purposes to them, or deploy force where others have clear ones and we
don’t.
Obama may say he has objectives in Iraq, Syria, etc. But they are
manifestly not decisive or well-defined.
And that’s why Iran is in the driver’s seat, with the strategic
initiative in this dynamic. It’s why Iran’s reasons to stalk us in
the Bab El-Mandeb Strait, at the moment the battle for Mosul is
getting underway, are making the decisions for our forces – instead of
the intentions of our own commander in chief. We’re being jerked
around by someone else’s initiative, because that’s what always
happens in a war zone when you don’t exercise your own. You end up in
the wrong place, getting shot at.
Received on Mon Oct 17 2016 - 12:16:58 EDT