History > 2014 > USA > International (II)

Pro-Western activists were overpowered in the clashes in Kharkiv.

Olga Ivashchenko/Associated Press

Kremlin Deploys Military in Ukraine, Prompting Protest by U.S. 

NYT

1.3.2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/world/europe/ukraine.html

Iran Secretly Sending Drones

and Supplies Into Iraq, U.S. Officials Say

 

JUNE 25, 2014

The New York Times

By MICHAEL R. GORDON

and ERIC SCHMITT

BRUSSELS — Iran is directing surveillance drones over Iraq from an airfield in Baghdad and is supplying Iraqi forces with tons of military equipment and other supplies, according to American officials.

The secret Iranian programs are a rare instance in which Iran and the United States share a near-term goal: countering the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, the Sunni militants who have seized towns and cities in a blitzkrieg across western and northern Iraq. But even as the two nations provide military support to the embattled government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, they are watching each other’s actions warily as they jostle for influence in the region.

Senior American officials emphasized that the parallel efforts were not coordinated, and in an appearance at NATO headquarters here on Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry highlighted some of the potential risks.

“From our point of view, we’ve made it clear to everyone in the region that we don’t need anything to take place that might exacerbate the sectarian divisions that are already at a heightened level of tension,” Mr. Kerry said.

Both the United States and Iran have small numbers of military advisers in Iraq. As many as 300 American commandos are being deployed to assess Iraqi forces and the deteriorating security situation, while about a dozen officers from Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force have been sent to advise Iraqi commanders and to help mobilize more than 2,000 Shiites from southern Iraq, American officials say.

“Iran is likely to be playing somewhat of an overarching command role within the central Iraqi military apparatus, with an emphasis on maintaining cohesiveness in Baghdad and the Shia south and managing the reconstitution of Shia militias,” said Charles Lister, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar.

Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the head of the Quds Force, has paid at least two visits to Iraq to help Iraqi military advisers plot strategy. And Iranian transport planes have been making twice-daily flights to Baghdad with military equipment and supplies, 70 tons per flight, for the Iraqi forces.

“It’s a substantial amount,” said a senior American official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing classified reports. “It’s not necessarily heavy weaponry, but it is not just light arms and ammunition.”

The Iranian involvement comes as Syria has intervened militarily by carrying out airstrikes in western Iraq against ISIS fighters, according to American officials, who said they could not confirm reports of civilian casualties. It is not clear whether Syria decided on its own to target ISIS or whether President Bashar al-Assad was acting at the behest of Iran or Iraq, the officials said. But it appears that Syria, Iran and the United States are all fighting a common enemy.

In his news conference at NATO, Mr. Kerry expressed concern that the war in Iraq was being “widened.”

“That’s one of the reasons why government formation is so urgent, so that the leaders of Iraq can begin to make decisions necessary to protect Iraq without outside forces moving to fill a vacuum,” he said.

The Obama administration has sought to open a dialogue with Iran on the Iraq crisis. William J. Burns, the deputy secretary of state, met briefly last week with an Iranian diplomat at the margins of the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program taking place in Vienna. But Western officials say there appear to be divisions between the Iranian Foreign Ministry, which may be open to some degree of cooperation, and General Suleimani, who was the mastermind of Iran’s strategy when Iraqi Shiite militias trained by Iran attacked American troops there with powerful explosive devices supplied by Tehran. The general is also the current architect of Iranian military support in Syria for Mr. Assad.

In the weeks since ISIS swept across northern Iraq, the United States has increased its surveillance flights over Iraq and is now flying about 30 to 35 missions a day. The flights include piloted aircraft, such as F-18s and P-3 surveillance planes, as well as drones.

Mounting its own effort, according to American officials, Iran has set up a special control center at Rasheed Air Base in Baghdad and is flying a small fleet of Ababil surveillance drones over Iraq.

Having occupied crucial sections of Syria over the past year and more recently seizing vast areas of Iraq, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria controls territory greater than many countries and now rivals Al Qaeda as the world’s most powerful jihadist group. The group seized Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, on June 10.

An Iranian signals intelligence unit has also been deployed at the airfield to intercept electronic communications between ISIS fighters and commanders, said another American official, who, like the others, spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The airfield may be the first former American base in Iraq to be used for Iranian operations. American forces used it after they invaded Iraq in 2003, and during the early phase of the occupation, an aviation squadron was based there, calling it Camp Redcatcher.

“The Iranians are playing in a big way in Iraq,” Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, said in an interview.

While Iran has not sent large numbers of troops into Iraq, as many as 10 divisions of Iranian and Quds Force troops are massed on the Iran-Iraq border, ready to come to Mr. Maliki’s aid if the Iraqi capital is imperiled or Shiite shrines in cities like Samarra are seriously threatened, American officials said.

Some officials said that about two dozen Iranian aircraft had been stationed in western Iran for possible operations over Iraq.

The security crisis in Iraq was just one topic discussed in Mr. Kerry’s meetings with officials who have gathered here for a meeting of NATO foreign ministers focused on Ukraine and alliance issues. Afterward, he departed for Paris, taking the train with his staff because of an air-traffic control strike.

On Thursday, Mr. Kerry plans to meet in Paris with the Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, as well as with Saad Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister. But a major reason for the stop is to discuss Syria and the “grave security situation” in Iraq with his counterparts from Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, a senior State Department official said.

Michael R. Gordon reported from Brussels, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on June 26, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Iran Aids Iraq With Drones and Military Gear.

    Iran Secretly Sending Drones
    and Supplies Into Iraq, U.S. Officials Say, NYT, 25.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/world/middleeast/iran-iraq.html

Answering a Cleric’s Call,

Iraqi Shiites Take Up Arms

JUNE 21, 2014
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS

BAGHDAD — The long lines of Shiite fighters began marching through the capital early Saturday morning. Some wore masks. One group had yellow and green suicide explosives, which they said were live, strapped to their chests.

As their numbers grew, they swelled into a seemingly unending procession of volunteers with rifles, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, backed by mortar crews and gun and rocket trucks.

The Mahdi Army, the paramilitary force that once led a Shiite rebellion against American troops here, was making its largest show of force since it suspended fighting in 2008. This time, its fighters were raising arms against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, the Qaeda splinter group that has driven Iraq’s security forces from parts of the country’s north and west.

Chanting “One, two, three, Mahdi!” they implored their leader, the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, to send them to battle.

Large sections of Baghdad and southern Iraq’s Shiite heartland have been swept up in a mass popular mobilization, energized by the fatwa of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani urging able-bodied Iraqis to take up arms against Sunni extremists. Shiite and mixed neighborhoods now brim with militias, who march under arms, staff checkpoints and hold rallies to sign up more young men. Fighting raged in northern and western Iraq on Saturday, with the Sunni insurgents making some gains near a strategic border crossing with Syria.

The Mahdi Army rally in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad on Saturday was the largest and most impressive paramilitary display so far, but there were also mass militia parades in other cities, including Najaf and Basra on Saturday, and smaller rallies in Baghdad on Friday, equally motivated by what participants described as patriotic and religious fervor.

Together, the militias constitute a patchwork of seasoned irregulars who once resisted American occupation, Iranian proxies supported by Tehran, and pop-up Shiite tribal fighting groups that are rushing young men to brief training courses before sending them to fight beside the Iraqi Army against ISIS.

It is a mobilization fraught with passion, confusion and grave risk.

Militia members and their leaders insist they have taken up arms to defend their government, protect holy places and keep their country from breaking up along sectarian or ethnic lines. They have pledged to work alongside the Iraqi Army.

But as Iraq lurches toward sectarian war, the prominent role of Shiite-dominated militias could also exacerbate sectarian tensions, hardening the sentiments that have allowed the Sunni militants to succeed.

Moreover, some of the militias have dark histories that will make it hard for them to garner national support. Some commanders have been linked to death squads that carried out campaigns of kidnappings and killing against Sunnis, including from hospitals.

Against this background, even as more armed men have appeared on the streets, Shiite clerics have taken pains to cast the mobilization as a unity movement, even if it has a mostly Shiite face.

“Our mission is to explain to the people what Ayatollah Sistani said,” said Sheikh Emad al-Gharagoli, after leading prayers Thursday afternoon at the Maitham al-Tamar Mosque in Sadr City. “He said, ‘Do not make your own army, this army does not belong to the Shia. It belongs to all of Iraq. It is for the Shia, the Sunni, the Kurds and the Christians.’ ”

The clerics have also said the mobilization will be temporary, that the militias will be disbanded once the ISIS threat subsides.

But given the swift gains by ISIS and the lax performance of the Iraqi Army, analysts do not expect the infusion of Shiite militias to quickly turn the tide. And as the militias focus on establishing themselves, their leaders face a host of daunting practical matters intended to convert a religious call to a coherent fighting force.

Sheikh Haidar al-Maliki, who is organizing fighters of the Bani Malik tribe in Baghdad, said he had been in constant consultation with the government to ensure that the tribe’s call-up ran efficiently.

He has been seeking letters from the army that volunteers can show their employers to protect their jobs while they are fighting, and asking for uniforms and weapons for the few men who have not appeared with their own. He said he was also asking for government-issued identification cards, so that as thousands of armed men head to and from battle, it might be possible to know who is who at checkpoints along the way.

The Bani Malik militia is new. The tribe’s volunteers, at one registration rally, showed up with mismatched weapons and uniforms. Many of the weapons were dated. Some were in disrepair.

Nonetheless, Sheikh Maliki said, in a week, he had already sent hundreds of young men to military bases, where they are trained for a few days before shipping out to provinces where the army has been fighting ISIS.

“We do it step by step,” he said. “But we work very quickly.”

His militias had already fought in Mosul and near Baquba, he said. On Thursday, the first of its members died of battle wounds.

Other young men have been lining up to replace the fallen.

Ahmed al-Maliki, 23, a business-management student, said he had begun military training more than a month ago, in anticipation that ISIS’s campaign would grow.

His training, even before Ayatollah Sistani’s June 13 call to arms, pointed to what Sheikh Maliki said was the Shiite tribes’ realization early this year, after ISIS seized Falluja, that they needed to prepare for clashes with Sunni extremists.

The recent call-up, he said, was a public step that invigorated a body of quieter work already well underway.

The Bani Malik tribe had organized volunteers into 25-man units, each led by an active-duty Iraqi soldier who had been training them in weapons, small-unit tactics and communications.

Ahmed al-Maliki said he had never served in the army, and did not fight as a militant during the American occupation from 2003 to 2011.

But in the preparatory system that his tribe had organized this spring, he had learned to use a Kalashnikov that his family owned and other weapons under the instruction of Mustafa al-Maliki, a three-year Iraqi Army veteran.

“I don’t have any experience in the army,” Ahmed said. “But I can serve my country and do as Ayatollah Sistani says.”

For the Mahdi Army, the mobilization has not been a matter of creating a militia, but of preparing fighters for battle again.

Many of its members marching on Friday and Saturday had combat experience. They appeared in uniforms and with many newer weapons, typically in a better state of cleanliness and repair.

One member, who gave only a first name, Ahmed, said he had been with the Mahdi Army since 2004, and fought many times.

A Mahdi Army leader, Hakim al-Zamili, a member of Iraq’s Parliament who was accused of organizing death squads when he served as Iraq’s deputy health minister, appeared with a Mahdi unit on Friday evening and said that he intended to fight ISIS personally.

Mr. Zamili had been captured and held by American forces, and was released only after an Iraqi government trial on terrorism charges stalled after witnesses did not appear. He suggested that experienced militias would prove more nimble than Iraq’s conventional army.

“Why do the terrorists win battles against the Iraqi Army?” he asked. “Because the army is afraid to do what it must. They don’t have the right leadership.”

“The Army waits for orders,” he continued. “But the militias will do it quickly. We can seize a place and then give it to the army.”

A Mahdi fighter, who declined to give his name, framed it another way. “There is a difference between army fighting and street fighting,” he said. “We are street fighters.”

On one point the militias have been firm: In interviews throughout the past week, clerics and fighters for different groups said they did not want American ground forces in Iraq again, even to fight ISIS.

Some of the militias said they would, however, welcome other forms of military aid, and did not oppose President Obama’s commitment to send military advisers to Baghdad.

“We need matériel, and guns, and intelligence, or drones,” Sheikh Maliki said.

The sheikh said Iraq would also need Washington’s political and diplomatic help, in particular to try to sever ISIS’s foreign support, including, he said, from donors in Persian Gulf states and Turkey.

“If America helps us in these ways,” he said, “we can stop them.”

Deep divisions remain between many Shiite tribes and militias, which have competed for resources, power and standing, and had varied relations with Iran and attitudes toward the West. At the Mahdi rollout on Saturday, fighters burned Israeli and American flags, along with the black banner of ISIS.

For now, Sheikh Maliki and Mr. Zamili said, the militias have set aside most of their disagreements to face a common foe.

“We have differences,” Mr. Zamili said. “But in front of our enemies, we are one.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 22, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Answering a Cleric’s Call, Iraqi Shiites Take Up Arms.

    Answering a Cleric’s Call, Iraqi Shiites Take Up Arms, NYT, 21.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/world/middleeast/iraq-militia.html

As Sunnis Die in Iraq,

a Cycle Is Restarting

 

JUNE 17, 2014
The New York Times
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
and ROD NORDLAND

BAGHDAD — As Sunni militants rampaged across northern Iraq last week, executing Iraqi soldiers and government workers and threatening to demolish Shiism’s most sacred shrines, Iraq’s Shiites suffered mostly in silence, maintaining a patience urged on them by their religious leaders through months of deadly bombings.

On Tuesday, though, there were signs that their patience had run out.

The bodies of 44 Sunni prisoners were found in a government-controlled police station in Baquba, about 40 miles north of Baghdad. They had all been shot Monday night in the head or chest. Then the remains of four young men who had been shot were found dumped Tuesday on a street in a Baghdad neighborhood controlled by Shiite militiamen.

By evening, it was Shiites who were the victims again, as a suicide bombing in a crowded market in Sadr City killed at least 14 people, local hospital officials said.

It is a darkly familiar cycle of violence, one that took hold in Iraq in 2006 and generated a vicious sectarian war over the next three years: Sunni extremists explode suicide bombs in Shiite neighborhoods, and Shiite militias retaliate by torturing and executing Sunnis. This time, though, without the presence of the American military, it has the potential to grow much worse.

That bloodletting was stopped in 2008 only after Iraqi tribal leaders in the pay of the American military rebelled against the Sunni extremists. With Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki now encouraging what he says are hundreds of thousands of Shiites to rise to the defense of Iraq, and after years of sectarian government that has deeply alienated the tribes as well as the Sunnis, it is not clear that such a strategy, if tried, would meet with the same success.

“If there is no fast solution to what is happening, the situation will go back to daily attacks and will return to what happened back in 2006,” said Masroor Aswad, a member of the Independent Human Rights Commission here. He said the minority Sunnis were terrified that they would be blamed for any violence against Shiites, leaving them vulnerable to brutal retaliatory attacks from the Shiite militias.

In Baquba, the killings took place after an assault in which militants aligned with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria overran several neighborhoods, security officials there said. A police source said the Sunni militants attacked the police station where the men, suspected of ties to the insurgents, were being held for questioning.

“Those people were detainees who were arrested in accordance with Article 4 terrorism offenses,” he said, referring to Iraqi antiterrorism legislation that gives security forces extraordinary arrest powers. “They were killed inside the jail by the policemen before they withdrew from the station last night.”

Brig. Gen. Jameel Kamal al-Shimmari, the police commander in Baquba, said that officers had repulsed the militants from the city after a three-hour gun battle in the same area as the police station where the prisoners were subsequently killed.
Continue reading the main story

“Everything in the city is now under control, and the groups of armed men are not seen in the city,” General Shimmari said on Tuesday.

Officials at the morgue in Baquba said that two police officers had been killed in the fighting.

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria claimed in a Twitter post that the prisoners had been executed by the police.

An Iraqi military spokesman, Gen. Qassim Atta, blamed the deaths in Baquba on the militants, saying the prisoners died when the station was struck with hand grenades and mortars. However, a source at the morgue in Baquba said that many of the victims had been shot to death at close range. Like many of the official sources in Iraq, he spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media.

The fighting in Baquba was particularly worrying, because it represented the closest the rebel group and its allies have come to the capital. After capturing Mosul a week ago, the group has advanced more than 230 miles, mostly down the valley of the Tigris River. Baquba, and the surrounding province of Diyala, is a volatile mix of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, and was the scene of some of the worst sectarian violence in past years.

As the fighting creeps closer to Baghdad, the offensive is being led not just by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria but by fighters drawn from other Sunni militant groups — the 1920 Revolution Brigades and the Islamic Army, according to an Iraqi intelligence source. Both of those groups have long had a presence in Diyala Province and were involved in some of the bloodiest fighting during the past sectarian battles. The 1920 Revolution Brigades was formed by disaffected Iraqi Army officers who were left without jobs after the Americans dissolved the military in 2003.

Throughout Baghdad, residents expressed fears that the violence was finding its way back into their neighborhoods. “You see gunmen in the street; you don’t know who is who,” said Ahmad al-Kharabai, who has a small hardware store in Al-Adil, a mixed neighborhood in southern Baghdad where Sunnis live mainly on one side of the primary road and Shiites live mainly on the other.

“You don’t know who is with you, and who’s against you,” he said.

Many militiamen have come into the neighborhood, and though they do not visibly carry guns, no one doubts they have them. Still Mr. Kharabai said he was hopeful Iraq would not deteriorate into a cycle of revenge killings. “I think Iraqis know the mistake they made in 2006 and will not repeat it,” he said.

Mohammed al-Gailani, who owns a grocery shop in the largely Sunni neighborhood of Dora, was more pessimistic.

“People are afraid, we are afraid of the militiamen around; I think things will go as badly as they did before,” he said, adding that he was desperate to leave with his family for Turkey but that flights were booked for weeks. A travel agent refused even to estimate how long it would take to get him and his five children and wife on a plane.

Mr. Gailani’s greatest fear is that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria will gain ground. “Any gain by ISIS will have a negative effect on Sunnis here,” he said.

In eastern Baghdad, the bodies of four young men were found without identity documents on a street in the Benuk neighborhood on Tuesday morning. They were believed to have been Sunnis, because the area is controlled by Shiite militiamen. The area is largely Shiite but also includes Sunnis, and no one had initially claimed the young men’s bodies, an Interior Ministry official said. The victims were 25 to 30 years old and had been shot multiple times, he said.

The killings fit the pattern of Shite death squads during the sectarian violence in 2006 and 2007, at the height of the American-led invasion. At the peak of the violence, as many as 80 bodies a day were found in Baghdad and its immediate suburbs.

The situation was highly fluid on Tuesday, with the Iraqi Army focused on trying to win back some of the ground it had lost. By late Tuesday, government officials said they had regained the northern city of Tal Afar, which the militants had taken just a day earlier. The fight went on for 48 hours and was helped by an air drop of reinforcements, said a local Turkmen leader, Fawzi Akram Terzi.

However, there had not yet been any official government announcement of the recapture of the city.

The Iraqi government issued a statement accusing Saudi Arabia of funding the Sunni extremists, as Mr. Maliki continued to offer explanations for the stunning success of the Sunni extremists that do not focus on his leadership. The statement drew almost immediate criticism from the United States, with Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, describing it as inaccurate and “offensive.”

Suadad al-Salhy contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on June 18, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

As Sunnis Die in Iraq, a Cycle Is Restarting.

    As Sunnis Die in Iraq, a Cycle Is Restarting, NYT, 17.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/world/middleeast/
    sectarian-violence-appears-to-spread-to-streets-of-baghdad.html

Militants Claim

Mass Execution of Iraqi Forces

JUNE 15, 2014
The New York Times
By ROD NORDLAND
and ALISSA J. RUBIN

BAGHDAD — Wielding the threat of sectarian slaughter, Sunni Islamist militants claimed on Sunday that they had massacred hundreds of captive Shiite members of Iraq’s security forces, posting grisly pictures of a mass execution in Tikrit as evidence and warning of more killing to come.

Even as anecdotal reports of extrajudicial killings around the country seemed to bear out the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’s intent to kill Shiites wherever it could, Iraqi officials and some human rights groups cautioned that the militants’ claim to have killed 1,700 soldiers in Tikrit could not be immediately verified.

But with their claim, the Sunni militants were reveling in an atrocity that if confirmed would be the worst yet in the conflicts that roil the region, outstripping even the poison gas attack near Damascus last year.

In an atmosphere where there were already fears that the militants’ sudden advance near the capital would prompt Shiite reprisal attacks against Sunni Arab civilians, the claims by ISIS were potentially explosive. And that is exactly the group’s stated intent: to stoke a return to all-out sectarian warfare that would bolster its attempts to carve out a Sunni Islamist caliphate that crosses borders through the region.
Photo
An image posted on militant websites on Saturday appeared to show fighters with captured Iraqi soldiers in plainclothes after taking over a base in Tikrit. Credit via Associated Press

The sectarian element of the killings, and reports late Sunday that the city of Tal Afar, west of Mosul, had also fallen, may put more pressure on the Obama administration to aid Iraq militarily. In fact, the militants seemed to be counting on it. A pronouncement on Sunday by the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had a clear message for the United States: “Soon we will face you, and we are waiting for this day.”

The group’s announcement was made in a series of gruesome photographs uploaded to an ISIS Twitter feed and on websites late on Saturday night. Some showed insurgents, many wearing black masks, lining up at the edges of what looked like shallow mass graves and apparently firing their weapons into young men who had their hands bound behind their backs and were packed closely together in large groups.

The photographs showed what appeared to be seven massacre sites, although several of them may have been different views of the same sites. In any one of the pictures, no more than about 60 victims could be seen and sometimes as few as 20 at each of the sites, although it was not clear if the photographs showed the entire graves.

The militants’ captions seemed tailor-made to ignite anger and fear among Shiites. “The filthy Shiites are killed in the hundreds,” one read. “The liquidation of the Shiites who ran away from their military bases,” read another, and, “This is the destiny of Maliki’s Shiites,” referring to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

Many of the captions mocked the victims. In one photograph, showing a group of young men walking toward an apparent execution site, where armed masked men awaited, the caption read, “Look at them walking to death on their own feet.”

A senior Iraqi government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to make press statements, said news of the executions was slow to circulate because Twitter and other social media sites had been blocked for days. “I don’t doubt they are real, but 1,700 is a big number,” he said. “We are trying to control the reaction.”

Acutely aware of the potential for retaliatory violence, some government officials who had heard about the ISIS claims took pains to play them down, confirming only that some executions had taken place in Tikrit, but not on a large scale.

One Iraqi security official claimed that no more than 11 bodies of executed soldiers were recovered from the Tigris River downstream from the execution site, a group of six and a group of five, although he confirmed that 800 soldiers had been taken prisoner in the area. He also reported finding 17 bodies washed up against a dam near Samarra, another city the militants are fighting for. But he said, “There is no such superstitious number as 1,700 people executed.”

An official statement posted on the Ministry of Defense’s website denied the executions had taken place at all.

Still, other officials and human rights representatives, while cautioning that they could not confirm the full 1,700 number being claimed, said that ISIS had shown no compunctions against hunting Shiites. And they reiterated that such horrific claims would go to further the group’s intent to sow chaos.

“We’re trying to verify the pics, and I am not convinced they are authentic,” said Erin Evers, the Human Rights Watch researcher in Iraq. “As far as ISIS claiming it has killed 1,700 people and publishing horrific photos to support that claim, it is unfortunately in keeping with their pattern of commission of atrocities, and obviously intended to further fuel sectarian war.”

Col. Suhail al-Samaraie, head of the Awakening Council in Samarra, a pro-government Sunni grouping, confirmed that officials in Salahuddin Province were aware that large-scale executions had taken place, but did not know how many. “They are targeting anyone working with the government side, any place, anywhere,” he said. He said the insurgents were targeting both Sunnis and Shiites, anyone with a government affiliation, but claiming for propaganda reasons that the victims were all Shiites.

A New York Times employee in Tikrit said local residents saw hundreds of Iraqi military personnel captured when they tried to flee Camp Speicher, a former American military base and airfield now used as an air force training center on the edge of Tikrit. It is still in government hands.

Most of those captured were air force cadets, the employee said. Those who were Sunnis were given civilian clothes and sent home; the Shiites were marched and trucked off to the grounds of Saddam Hussein’s old palace in Tikrit, where they reportedly were executed. He added that the bodies had been dumped in the Tigris River, which runs by the palace compound.

The ISIS photographs appeared to have been taken at that location, the employee said. However, he said he had not spoken to any witnesses who claimed to have seen the executions or the victims’ bodies.

Ryan C. Crocker, a former ambassador to Iraq and a critic of America’s 2011 withdrawal from that nation after the two countries failed to sign a mutual security pact, said the atrocity claims, proven or not, made it more urgent than ever for Washington to become involved.

“What this administration has to do is get John Kerry on a plane right now, like we did when I was there, and sit down with Shia, Sunni and Kurdish leaders and help them get to a position of declared national unity. Iraqis have to stand together now,” Mr. Crocker said. Regarding the massacres, he said, “Whatever it is, however many people, it’s clearly an effort to ignite an Iraqi civil war.”

Political analysts here mostly agreed about the militants’ intent. “The problem now is that you are dealing with emotions and ISIS is trying to provoke the other side to take revenge,” said Ameer Jabbar al-Sa’aedi, a Baghdad-based analyst. “There are extremists among the Shia, too, and if they respond, they could begin killing and not exclude anyone. It would be just like what happened in 2006.”

Even though Ayatollah Sistani’s statement over the weekend was intended to call for restraint on the part of Shiites, it came after his call just a day before for every Iraqi to take up arms to support the government.

That appeal was expected to greatly accelerate the formation of volunteer groups to supplement Shiite militias — nominally to fight alongside the Iraqi Army. But during the worst of the sectarian bloodletting in Iraq, from 2005 through 2007, some such Shiite groups were deeply involved in violence that was killing as many as 1,000 civilians each week.

One militia leader, Abu Bakr al-Zubaidi, from a group called Asaib Al Haq, a hard-line offshoot of the Mahdi Army militia, said he was not surprised to hear of the executions.

“ISIS regards Shia as their eternal enemy, and they will kill whoever falls in their hands who is Shia, whether they are soldiers, grocers or even singers,” he said. “Our response to that is there will not be any living ISIS prisoner.”

Tim Arango contributed reporting from Erbil, Iraq,

and Aziz Alwan from Baghdad.

A version of this article appears in print on June 16, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

MILITANTS CLAIM MASS EXECUTION OF IRAQI FORCES.

    Militants Claim Mass Execution of Iraqi Forces, NYT, 15.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/16/world/middleeast/iraq.html

Syria Suicide Bombing

Puts U.S. Face on Jihad Video

Officials Fear Moner Mohammad Abusalha’s
Jihad Video Will Inspire Others

 

JUNE 14, 2014
The New York Times
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

WASHINGTON — Like a trailer for a summer blockbuster, the video begins with loud music and the words “Coming Soon.”

But instead of superheroes or comedians on screen, there are images of a burning American flag and a jetliner hitting the World Trade Center, and the words: “Join the Caravan of Jihad and Martyrdom.”

As the music fades away, the blurred face of a man appears. He makes a direct appeal to Americans to join the fight.

The video ends with footage of a United States passport being burned. Men are heard laughing and shouting an Arabic phrase about God’s greatness.

Although the recruitment video has circulated among extremist groups for some days, intelligence analysts now believe the man with the blurred face is a 22-year-old from Florida who blew himself up last month in a suicide attack on Syrian government forces that killed 37, according to senior American government officials.

The man, Moner Mohammad Abusalha, who took his own life in a truck bombing mission, is one of roughly 100 Americans who have tried to travel to Syria to fight alongside Islamic extremists, or who have actually done so. American officials express deep concerns that the video may inspire others to follow his path.

The American authorities had tracked his indirect travels to Syria, but they knew very little about him at the time. It is not illegal to travel there, and many others have done so for humanitarian reasons. It was only after he arrived in Syria that the authorities here learned through intelligence sources that he was planning a suicide attack, senior American officials said.

Once Mr. Abusalha’s intentions were clear, there was little the United States could do to stop him because there are no American or allied forces in Syria, and certainly none who could have taken action inside the militant organization that Mr. Abusalha had joined, according to government officials. Had the authorities known before he arrived in Syria that he intended to fight alongside extremists, they most likely would have had enough evidence to charge him with providing material support to terrorists, as they have done with several other Americans.

The officials declined to say how the United States obtained intelligence that he was fighting alongside militants and was planning to blow himself up in a suicide truck-bomb attack. But in the past year, the authorities have obtained similar information in Syria from contacts on the ground, electronic intercepts like cellphones and foreign intelligence agencies.

As the unrest in Syria has spread into Iraq recently, and the group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has gained ground, American and European authorities have grown increasingly concerned that some of their citizens may be traveling to Syria to take up the militants’ cause.

One area of concern in the United States is Minnesota, where the F.B.I. has received reports that several young men of Somali descent there have traveled to Syria to fight, officials said. Starting in 2007, a number of men 0f Somali descent in Minnesota and elsewhere in the United States have traveled to Somalia to fight alongside Islamist extremists. At least three carried out suicide attacks there.

“There’s an active investigation ongoing to discern how many have traveled there,” said Kyle Loven, a spokesman for the F.B.I.’s Minneapolis field office.

There have been countless videos, Twitter posts and other pieces of propaganda released by extremists since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. A number of them have highlighted American citizens. But this video is believed to be the first that features an American in the expanding attempts to recruit other Americans to go fight in Syria. It comes amid growing fears among American and European officials about young men flocking to fight in Syria and Iraq, who may return as battle-hardened fighters to commit violence at home.

“We’ve had Saudis, Algerians, Russians but never an American featured in a propaganda video, and Americans are the best poster boys for propaganda,” said Laith Alkhouri, a senior analyst at Flashpoint Global Partners, a security consulting firm that tracks militant websites, referring to the conflict in Syria. “It is the United States who is leading the war on terror. And what they’re saying is, ‘We have Americans, we are here to welcome Americans. Don’t hesitate to travel to come join the fight.’ ”

Although the suicide bomber was not identified by nationality or name, a video was circulated last month that appears to have documented Mr. Abusalha’s mission. That previous video shows rebels loading what appear to be tank shells into a large vehicle that had been armored with metal plates. Later, there is a large explosion after the vehicle drives down a road.

Mr. Abusalha was born in Florida, played basketball as a teenager and was known as “Mo.” In high school, he would often sneak out to pray instead of study. His mother is American and his father Palestinian. They owned grocery stores in the Vero Beach, Fla., area.

After graduating from high school, he enrolled in three colleges but dropped out of each, and in 2012, he told friends he was moving to Orlando. Shortly thereafter he told friends he was moving to Jordan to take courses as a nursing assistant.

In the past year, he lost touch with his parents. His friends believe that he was recruited by extremists while he was living in Jordan. In Syria, he adopted a nom de guerre, Abu Huraira al-Amriki. He spent two months in a training camp of Nusra Front, the militant group, in Aleppo before going to the northern province of Idlib, where he carried out the suicide attack.

In the video clip of the man with the blurred face, he points at the camera and pats his chest as he describes why Americans should travel to Syria to fight. He uses the Arabic word “haq,” which means divine obligation.

“Jihad is protecting Islam,” he said. “It is now haq on you to protect your brothers and oppressed, and it’s haq on you to fight,” he said.

The video that appeared to feature the suicide bomber was released last month by the Global Islamic Media Front. That group has put out similar ones from Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The video did not say which group the suicide bomber had joined. But it has been billed as a preview for a larger clip that will soon be released about an American martyr who died fighting a holy war in Syria, according to analysts who monitor extremists’ websites and online chatter.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on June 15, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Suicide in Syria Puts U.S. Face on Jihad Video.

    Syria Suicide Bombing Puts U.S. Face on Jihad Video,
    NYT, 14.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/world/middleeast/
    fear-of-trend-after-bombing-by-a-us-man.html

The End of Iraq

Changing Maps in the Mideast

JUNE 14, 2014
The New York Times


EVERY so often, in the post-9/11 era, an enterprising observer circulates a map of what the Middle East might look like, well, after: after America’s wars in the region, after the various revolutions and counterrevolutions, after the Arab Spring and the subsequent springtime for jihadists, after the Sunni-Shiite struggle for mastery. At some point, these cartographers suggest, the wave of post-9/11 conflict will necessarily redraw borders, reshape nation-states, and rub out some of the lines drawn by Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot in a secret Anglo-French treaty almost 100 years ago.

In 2006, it was Ralph Peters, the retired lieutenant colonel turned columnist, who sketched a map that subdivided Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and envisioned Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite republics emerging from a no-longer-united Iraq. Two years later, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg imagined similar partings-of-the-ways, with new microstates — an Alawite Republic, an Islamic Emirate of Gaza — taking shape and Afghanistan splitting up as well. Last year, it was Robin Wright’s turn in this newspaper, in a map that (keeping up with events) subdivided Libya as well.

Peters’s map, which ran in Armed Forces Journal, inspired conspiracy theories about how this was America’s real plan for remaking the Middle East. But the reality is entirely different: One reason these maps have remained strictly hypothetical, even amid regional turmoil, is that the United States has a powerful interest in preserving the Sykes-Picot status quo.

This is not because the existing borders are in any way ideal. Indeed, there’s a very good chance that a Middle East that was more politically segregated by ethnicity and faith might become a more stable and harmonious region in the long run.

Such segregation is an underappreciated part of Europe’s 20th-century transformation into a continent at peace. As Jerry Muller argued in Foreign Affairs in 2008, the brutal ethnic cleansing and forced migrations that accompanied and followed the two world wars ensured that “for the most part, each nation in Europe had its own state, and each state was made up almost exclusively of a single ethnic nationality,” which in turn sapped away some of the “ethnonational aspirations and aggression” that had contributed to imperialism, fascism and Hitler’s rise.

But this happened after the brutal ethnic cleansing that accompanied and followed two world wars. There’s no good reason to imagine that a redrawing of Middle Eastern borders could happen much more peacefully. Which is why American policy makers, quite sensibly, have preferred the problematic stability of current arrangements to the long-term promise of a Free Kurdistan or Baluchistan, a Greater Syria or Jordan, a Wahhabistan or Tripolitania.

This was true even of the most ambitious (and foolhardy) architects of the Iraq invasion, who intended to upset a dictator-dominated status quo ... but not, they mostly thought, in a way that would redraw national boundaries. Instead, the emphasis was on Iraq’s potential for post-Saddam cohesion, its prospects as a multiethnic model for democratization and development. That emphasis endured through the darkest days of our occupation, when the voices calling for partition — including the current vice president, Joe Biden — were passed over and unity remained America’s strategic goal.

This means that Iraq is now part of an arc, extending from Hezbollah’s fiefdom in Lebanon through war-torn Syria, in which official national borders are notional at best. And while full dissolution is not yet upon us, the facts on the ground in Iraq look more and more like Peters’s map than the country that so many Americans died to stabilize and secure.

What’s more, we pretty clearly lack both the will and the capacity to change them. It is possible, as The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins has argued, that a clearer Obama administration focus on Iraq, and a more effective attempt to negotiate a continued American presence three years ago, could have prevented this unraveling. (Little about this White House’s recent foreign policy record inspires much confidence in its efforts in Iraq.)

But now? Now our leverage relative to the more immediate players is at a modern low point, and the progress of regional war has a momentum that U.S. airstrikes are unlikely to arrest.

Our basic interests have not altered: better stability now, better the Sykes-Picot borders with all their flaws, than the very distant promise of a postconflict Middle Eastern map.

But two successive administrations have compromised those interests: one through recklessness, the other through neglect. Now the map is changing; now, as in early-20th-century Europe, the price of transformation is being paid in blood.


A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 15, 2014,

on page SR9 of the New York edition with the headline:

The End of Iraq.

    The End of Iraq, NYT, 14.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/opinion/sunday/
    ross-douthat-changing-maps-in-the-mideast.html

5 Principles for Iraq

JUNE 14, 2014
The New York Times
SundayReview | Op-Ed Columnist

THE disintegration of Iraq and Syria is upending an order that has defined the Middle East for a century. It is a huge event, and we as a country need to think very carefully about how to respond. Having just returned from Iraq two weeks ago, my own thinking is guided by five principles, and the first is that, in Iraq today, my enemy’s enemy is my enemy. Other than the Kurds, we have no friends in this fight. Neither Sunni nor Shiite leaders spearheading the war in Iraq today share our values.

The Sunni jihadists, Baathists and tribal militiamen who have led the takeover of Mosul from the Iraqi government are not supporters of a democratic, pluralistic Iraq, the only Iraq we have any interest in abetting. And Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, has proved himself not to be a friend of a democratic, pluralistic Iraq either. From Day 1, he has used his office to install Shiites in key security posts, drive out Sunni politicians and generals and direct money to Shiite communities. In a word, Maliki has been a total jerk. Besides being prime minister, he made himself acting minister of defense, minister of the interior and national security adviser, and his cronies also control the Central Bank and the Finance Ministry.

Maliki had a choice — to rule in a sectarian way or in an inclusive way — and he chose sectarianism. We owe him nothing.

The second principle for me derives from the most important question we need to answer from the Arab Spring. Why is it that the two states doing the best are those that America has had the least to do with: Tunisia and the semiautonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq?

Answer: Believe it or not, it’s not all about what we do and the choices we make. Arabs and Kurds have agency, too. And the reason that both Tunisia and Kurdistan have built islands of decency, still frail to be sure, is because the major contending political forces in each place eventually opted for the principle of “no victor, no vanquished.”

The two major rival parties in Kurdistan not only buried the hatchet between them but paved the way for democratic elections that recently brought a fast-rising opposition party, that ran on an anti-corruption platform, into government for the first time. And Tunisia, after much internal struggle and bloodshed, found a way to balance the aspirations of secularists and Islamists and agree on the most progressive Constitution in the history of the Arab world.

Hence my rule: The Middle East only puts a smile on your face when it starts with them — when they take ownership of reconciliation. Please spare me another dose of: It is all about whom we train and arm. Sunnis and Shiites don’t need guns from us. They need the truth. It is the early 21st century, and too many of them are still fighting over who is the rightful heir to the Prophet Muhammad from the 7th century. It has to stop — for them, and for their kids, to have any future.

Principle No. 3: Maybe Iran, and its wily Revolutionary Guards Quds Force commander, Gen. Qassem Suleimani, aren’t so smart after all. It was Iran that armed its Iraqi Shiite allies with the specially shaped bombs that killed and wounded many American soldiers. Iran wanted us out. It was Iran that pressured Maliki into not signing an agreement with the U.S. to give our troops legal cover to stay in Iraq. Iran wanted to be the regional hegemon. Well, Suleimani: “This Bud’s for you.” Now your forces are overextended in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, and ours are back home. Have a nice day.

We still want to forge a nuclear deal that prevents Iran from developing a bomb, so we have to be careful about how much we aid Iran’s Sunni foes. But with Iran still under sanctions and its forces and Hezbollah’s now fighting in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, well, let’s just say: advantage America.
 

Fourth: Leadership matters. While in Iraq, I visited Kirkuk, a city that has long been hotly contested between Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen. When I was there five years ago, it was a hellish war zone. This time I found new paved roads, parks and a flourishing economy and a Kurdish governor, Najimaldin Omar Karim, who was just re-elected in April in a fair election and won more seats thanks to votes from the minority Arabs and Turkmen.

“We focused on [improving] roads, terrible traffic, hospitals, dirty schools,” and increasing electricity from four hours a day to nearly 24 hours, said Dr. Karim, a neurosurgeon who had worked in America for 33 years before returning to Iraq in 2009. “People were tired of politics and maximalism. We [earned] the confidence and good feelings of Arabs and Turkmen toward a Kurdish governor. They feel like we don’t discriminate. This election was the first time Turkmen and Arabs voted for a Kurd.”

In the recent chaos, the Kurds have now taken full military control of Kirkuk, but I can tell you this: Had Maliki governed Iraq like Karim governed Kirkuk, we would not have this mess today. With the right leadership, people there can live together.

Finally, while none of the main actors in Iraq, other than Kurds, are fighting for our values, is anyone there even fighting for our interests: a minimally stable Iraq that doesn’t threaten us? And whom we can realistically help? The answers still aren’t clear to me, and, until they are, I’d be very wary about intervening.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 15, 2014,

on page SR11 of the New York edition with the headline:

5 Principles for Iraq.

    5 Principles for Iraq, NYT, 14.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/opinion/sunday/
    thomas-friedman-5-principles-for-iraq.html

Resurgent Violence

Underscores Morphing

of Al Qaeda Threat

 

JUNE 13, 2014
1:09 A.M. E.D.T.
The New York Times
By REUTERS

WASHINGTON/ISLAMABAD — - In Iraq, an al Qaeda splinter group is threatening Baghdad after seizing control of two cities. In Pakistan, the Taliban attacked a major airport twice in one week. And in Nigeria, the Islamist militant group Boko Haram was blamed for another mass kidnapping.

A cluster of militant attacks over the past week is a reminder of how the once-singular threat of al Qaeda has changed since the killing of Osama bin Laden, morphing or splintering into smaller, largely autonomous Islamist factions that in some cases are now overshadowing the parent group.

Each movement is different, fueled by local political and sectarian dynamics. But this week’s violence is a measure of their ambition and the long-term potential danger they pose to the West.

Between 2010 and 2013, the number of al Qaeda and al Qaeda-related groups rose 58 percent and the number of "Salafi jihadists" - violent proponents of an extreme form of Islam - more than doubled, according to a report by the RAND Corp think tank.

Daniel Benjamin, former U.S. State Department counterterrorism coordinator under President Barack Obama, said he was "considerably more optimistic 18 months ago than ... now" about the threat posed by al Qaeda-related groups.

Few examples are more vivid than the fall of northern Iraq, which has raised the prospect of the country's disintegration as a unified state.

Sunni insurgents known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, seized the northern city of Mosul on Tuesday, and then overran an area further south on Wednesday, capturing the city of Tikrit and threatening Iraq's capital, Baghdad.

The militants are exploiting deep resentment among Iraq's Sunni minority, which lost power when the 2003 U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein. Since the U.S. withdrawal in 2011, the Sunni population has become increasingly alienated from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Shii'ite-dominated government and his U.S.-trained military.

This has helped fuel the stunning resurgence of ISIL. The group seeks to create a caliphate based on medieval Sunni Islamic principles across Iraq and neighboring Syria, where it has become one of the fiercest rebel forces in the civil war to oust President Bashar al-Assad.

ISIL underscores the complexity of the new galaxy of militant groups. Earlier this year, it split from the core al Qaeda organization completely, after a dispute between ISIL's leader and bin Laden's successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

 

"WE ARE TALKING ABOUT YEARS"

Even if Iraq can survive the onslaught, there is no saying how long it might take to restore order. "This is a very protracted war against terror," said an adviser to Maliki. "We are not talking about months. We are talking about years."

It has taken years for the situation to reach its current low point. After the 2003 Iraq invasion, the disgruntled Sunni population initially served as the base for a bloody insurgency against the U.S. military and emerging Shi'ite majority rule.
Continue reading the main story

That revolt appeared to have been quelled by the time U.S. troops left in December 2011. But Iraqi Sunni grievances simmered, fanned by what they saw as Maliki's sectarian rule and failure to build an inclusive government and army.

The future members of ISIL, then calling themselves the Islamic State of Iraq, were ready when the uprising in Syria started in 2011 and moved in to take advantage of the chaos. Bolstered by their success on the battlefield, they renamed themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

With ISIL's lightning advance in Iraq in recent days, the army has seen thousands of soldiers desert their posts in the north. And in Baghdad, fears of a sectarian bloodbath have grown.

Benjamin, now at Dartmouth University, said that groups like ISIL and rival Jabhat al-Nusrah in Syria, while serious regional problems, do not pose the same direct threat to the United States and its allies that bin Laden's al Qaeda did.

"We shouldn't lose sight of that," he said. "I don't think it's an existential threat by any means."

 

TENSIONS HIGH IN PAKISTAN

Tensions are also running high in Pakistan, where a brazen attack by the Pakistani Taliban on the country’s biggest airport in Karachi underscored the resurgence of an Islamist group with longtime ties to al Qaeda. Ten militants were killed in a gun battle that claimed at least 34 other lives.

The Pakistani Taliban has vowed a large-scale campaign against government and security installations after months of failed peace negotiations. In response, the Pakistani army is expected to ramp up air strikes in restive tribal areas.

So far, cities like Islamabad and Lahore have not seen the kind of violence that has plagued other parts of the country. But observers expect that to change.

The Pakistani Taliban operate closely with al Qaeda, which has senior commanders deployed in the tribal areas, as well as the Afghan Taliban, who provide their Pakistani comrades with funding and logistical support.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has long advocated peace talks with the Taliban but the picture changed radically after the airport attack, with public opinion swinging back again in favor of an all-out military operation against the militants.

Signaling possible escalation, U.S. drones struck Taliban hideouts in Pakistan, killing at least 10 militants in response to the Karachi airport attack, officials said on Thursday, in the first such raids by unmanned CIA aircraft in six months.

Pakistani government officials said Islamabad had given the Americans "express approval" for the strikes - the first time Pakistan has admitted to such cooperation.

 

BOKO HARAM

In Nigeria, Islamist group Boko Haram, another al Qaeda-linked group, has stepped up attacks in recent months after the kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls in April sparked international outrage.

The group is suspected in the abduction last week of up to 30 women form nomadic settlements in Nigeria's northeast, close to where it grabbed the schoolgirls, residents and Nigerian media said. The militants were reported to be demanding cattle in exchange for the women.

Along with a desire for international attention, analysts believe the increasingly ferocious attacks are designed to embarrass the Nigerian government and ultimately give Boko Haram more negotiating power in its demand for the introduction of sharia law in northern Nigeria.

Bomb attacks in the capital of Abuja in the run-up to the World Economic Forum in May killed scores of people and illustrated the powerlessness of security forces to stop them.

Ahead of an election next year, President Goodluck Jonathan appears at pains to show his government can tackle Boko Haram, ordering a "full-scale operation" against the group and authorizing security forces to use "any means necessary under the law."

But that's easier said than done, given the difficulties faced by security forces in Africa's most populous nation.

Some analysts say that while Boko Haram's tactics are similar to al Qaeda's, any links are tenuous at best.

"They've got no particular interest in attacking Western targets. It's all focused on their aims: introducing sharia law and a level of autonomy, self-determination for the north," said Martin Roberts, a senior Africa analyst at research firm IHS.

One group that has repeatedly set its sights on American targets is the Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which was believed to have been behind the failed attempt in 2009 to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner by the so-called "underwear bomber."

In a message to the U.S. Congress on Thursday, Obama repeated his administration's warnings that AQAP is "the most active and dangerous affiliate of al Qaeda today."

But the militant splinter groups are evolving so rapidly that - thanks to ISIL's rapid expansion and to operations against AQAP in Yemen - that may no longer be true.

(Additional reporting by David Dolan in Abuja

and Warren Strobel in Washington.;

Writing by Jason Szep and Matt Spetalnick;

Editing by David Storey and Lisa Shumaker)

    Resurgent Violence Underscores Morphing of Al Qaeda Threat,
    NYT, 13.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2014/06/13/world/middleeast/
    13reuters-iraq-security-alqaeda.html

Iraq in Peril

Prime Minister Maliki Panics

as Insurgents Gain

 

JUNE 12, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Editorial
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

What’s happening in Iraq is a disaster and it is astonishing that the Iraqis and the Americans, who have been sharing intelligence, seem to have been caught flat-footed by the speed of the insurgent victories and the army defections.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is said to be in a panic. It is hard to be surprised by that, because more than anyone he is to blame for the catastrophe. Mr. Maliki has been central to the political disorder that has poisoned Iraq, as he wielded authoritarian power in favor of the Shiite majority at the expense of the minority Sunnis, stoked sectarian conflict and enabled a climate in which militants could gain traction.

With stunning efficiency, Sunni militants in recent days captured Mosul, the second-largest city; occupied facilities in the strategic oil-refining town of Baiji; and are now headed for Baghdad. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been forced to flee their homes and untold numbers have been killed.

The insurgency’s gains will not be a threat just to Iraq if the militants, who have also been fighting in Syria, succeed in establishing a radical Islamic state on the Iraq-Syria border. No one should want that — not the Kurds, not the Turks and not the Iranians.

The deadly surge is the work of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which grew out of Al Qaeda in Iraq and is considered even more violent than its predecessor. Since the United States withdrew from Iraq at the end of 2011, the group has steadily gained strength and recruited thousands of foreign fighters; it broke with Al Qaeda earlier this year and is now viewed as a leader of global jihad.

As this week’s events unfolded, it was alarming to learn of the swift capitulation of thousands of Iraqi Army troops who surrendered their weapons to the enemy and disappeared. After disbanding Saddam Hussein’s army in 2003 after the invasion by coalition forces and dismantling the government, the United States spent years and many billions of dollars building a new Iraqi Army, apparently for naught. The militants have captured untold quantities of American-supplied weaponry, including helicopters, and looted an estimated $425 million from Mosul’s banks.

The growing violence in Iraq was apparent throughout 2013, when more than 8,000 Iraqis were killed, including nearly 1,000 Iraqi security forces; news reports say the militants planned a takeover for more than a year. Given the Iraqi Army’s cowardice, it is understandable that the Kurds, who operate a well-managed semiautonomous region in northern Iraq, on Thursday took control of Kirkuk, a disputed northern city with important oil resources. It signals one more step toward the breakup of the state.

The turmoil has revived a debate over whether President Obama should have left a small residual force after the 2011 American troop withdrawal. It’s an academic argument, because the Iraqis refused. Falluja was the militants first big target, and Mr. Maliki did a turnabout last year and sought help from the White House, which quickly provided Hellfire missiles and low-tech surveillance drones. Other Iraqi requests — for more drones, F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopter gunships — are still in the pipeline.

Last month, Mr. Maliki also asked for airstrikes. The United States has a strategic interest in Iraq’s stability and Mr. Obama on Thursday said America was ready to do more, without going into detail. But military action seems like a bad idea right now. The United States simply cannot be sucked into another round of war in Iraq. In any case, airstrikes and new weapons would be pointless if the Iraqi Army is incapable of defending the country.

Why would the United States want to bail out a dangerous leader like Mr. Maliki, who is attempting to remain in power for a third term as prime minister? It is up to Iraq’s leaders to show leadership and name a new prime minister who will share power, make needed reforms and include all sectarian and ethnic groups, especially disenfranchised Sunnis, in the country’s political and economic life — if, indeed, it is not too late.

A version of this editorial appears in print on June 13, 2014,

on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline:

Iraq in Peril.

    Iraq in Peril, NYT, 12.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/13/opinion/
    prime-minister-maliki-panics-as-insurgents-gain.html

Sunni Fighters Gain

as They Battle 2 Governments,

and Other Rebels

JUNE 11, 2014
The New York Times
By THANASSIS CAMBANIS

GAZIANTEP, Turkey — The fighters with the Free Syrian Army were expecting an attack any day from the jihadists besieging the city of Minbej in war-torn Syria, fortifying their base, once a carpet factory, with concrete bomb-blast barriers.

But they did not suspect the teenagers pushing a broken-down sedan past the front gate. Then a boy who looked no older than 14 blew up the car and himself, unleashing an assault that killed or wounded nearly 30 rebel fighters and ultimately put all of Minbej under the control of the most extremist jihadi group in the Syrian conflict.

“They call us godless,” said Sheikh Hassan, the leader of the Free Syrian Army brigade that came under attack. “They attack us from the front, they attack us from the back.”

That battle was one snapshot of the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, a militant Sunni group whose thousands of fighters have occupied crucial swatches of Syria and have now surged into northern Iraq. The group has vowed to create a caliphate spanning the Sunni-dominated sections of neighboring countries.

In doing so, it is simultaneously battling the Syrian and Iraqi governments and Sunni rebels it considers insufficiently committed to Islam. Having seized vast areas of Iraqi territory and several large and strategic cities, including the country’s second-biggest, Mosul, it controls territory greater than many countries and now rivals, and perhaps overshadows, Al Qaeda as the world’s most powerful and active jihadist group.

The fighting in Minbej took place six months ago, but the methods the Islamists used so effectively in northern Syria helped set the stage for their blitzkrieg in Mosul, Tikrit and other important Iraqi cities this week.

Detailed descriptions from Sheikh Hassan and his men, along with several other rebels who have been fighting the jihadists for the last six months, paint an unsettling portrait of the formidable jihadist movement.

The group is a magnet for militants from around the world. On videos, Twitter and other media, the group showcases fighters from Chechnya, Germany, Britain and the United States.

Its members are better paid, better trained and better armed than even the national armies of Syria and Iraq, Sheikh Hassan said.

Many of the recruits are drawn by its extreme ideology. But others are lured by the high salaries, as well as the group’s ability to consolidate power, according to former members, civilians who have lived under its rule in northern Syria and moderate rebels.

Other rebel groups often squabble with one another while fighting the government. But the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has stayed cohesive while avoiding clashes with the military of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who seems content to give the group a wide berth while destroying the other rebel groups.

In areas that fall under their control, the jihadists work carefully to entrench their rule. They have attracted the most attention with their draconian enforcement of a fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic Shariah law, including the execution of Christians and Muslims deemed kufar, or infidels.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

On a recent Sunday, a steady trickle of civilian refugees from Minbej walked across the border to Turkey. “Thank God we’re free,” said a teenage boy named Ahmed, who had escaped with his family. He was relishing a cigarette, the first he had openly smoked in six months. But he refused to give his family name, because “ISIS watches everything.”

But the group is not only following a stone-age script. It also rapidly establishes control of local resources and uses them to extend and strengthen its grip.

It has taken over oil fields in eastern Syria, for example, and according to several rebel commanders and aid workers, has resumed pumping. It has also secured revenue by selling electricity to the government from captured power plants. In Iraq on Wednesday, the militants seized control of Baiji, the site of Iraq’s largest oil refinery and power plant.

In Minbej, the jihadists initially left bakeries and humanitarian aid groups alone, taking over their operations once they had established military control of the city. The group takes a cut of all humanitarian aid and commerce that passes through areas under its control.

One of the first militia leaders to resist the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Abu Towfik from the Nouredin Zinky Brigade, said its sophisticated tactics made its fighters hard to dislodge. Since last year, the militant group has fought with tanks captured from the Iraqi military.

Given that tenacity, Abu Towfik said, its members will be hard to drive out of the territory they now occupy in northern Syria and Iraq. “I am afraid as time goes on they will spread their extreme ideology, and we’ll have a regional war,” he added.

At a meeting of rebel commanders at a Gaziantep Hotel cafe, Abou Sfouk, head of the rebel Free Syrian Army’s Palestine Brigade, brought a prized captive: a former jihadist named Mustafa.

At the beginning of the uprising, Mustafa had fought with Abou Sfouk’s brigade, but he joined the Islamist group early last year, when it entered Syria from Iraq, because it offered to triple his salary, starting him at $400 a month.

“Wherever we took territory, we would declare people apostates and confiscate their property,” Mustafa said. “We took cars and money from Christians, and from Muslims we didn’t like.”

Mustafa, a trained bulldozer mechanic, became the “emir of the motor pool.” But he eventually came under suspicion when it became known that he had once served under the kufar rebel army.

After a summary trial before one of the group’s Islamic courts, Mustafa was sentenced to death. A friend helped him escape, and he sought protection with his old brigade commander.

“I would never trust him again,” said his old commander, Abou Sfouk. “But he has useful military information.”

The defector has revealed the locations of Islamist prisons and the identities of the group’s commanders. Many of the top leaders and front-line soldiers come from abroad, but more than half of the membership is made up of Syrian and Iraqi tribesmen, people well known to their relatives and former neighbors now fighting against them.

“We are moderate Muslims,” Sheikh Hassan said. “We will fight anyone who covers themselves in Islam and tries to talk in the name of our religion.”

A graduate of Quranic studies from Damascus University, Sheikh Hassan considers his own credentials impeccable. He learned to fight as a foreign volunteer with Iraqi resistance fighters attacking American soldiers a decade ago.

Now, he said, he is desperate for more American help as he wages a war against jihadists with whom he once shared a struggle. “There is a hole between us,” he said with a shrug. “We will have to kill them. But we’re humane. We won’t cut their throats; we will shoot them.”

Ben Hubbard contributed reporting from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

A version of this article appears in print on June 12, 2014,

on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline:

Sunni Fighters Gain as They Battle 2 Governments,

and Other Rebels.

    Sunni Fighters Gain as They Battle 2 Governments, and Other Rebels,
    NYT, 11.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/12/world/middleeast/
    the-militants-moving-in-on-syria-and-iraq.html

Iraq Said to Seek U.S. Strikes on Militants

 

JUNE 11, 2014
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — As the threat from Sunni militants in western Iraq escalated last month, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki secretly asked the Obama administration to consider carrying out airstrikes against extremist staging areas, according to Iraqi and American officials.

But Iraq’s appeals for a military response have so far been rebuffed by the White House, which has been reluctant to open a new chapter in a conflict that President Obama has insisted was over when the United States withdrew the last of its forces from Iraq in 2011.

The swift capture of Mosul by militants aligned with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has underscored how the conflicts in Syria and Iraq have converged into one widening regional insurgency with fighters coursing back and forth through the porous border between the two countries. But it has also called attention to the limits the White House has imposed on the use of American power in an increasingly violent and volatile region.

A spokeswoman for the National Security Council, Bernadette Meehan, declined to comment on Mr. Maliki’s requests. “We are not going to get into details of our diplomatic discussions,” she said in a statement. “The current focus of our discussions with the government of Iraq and our policy considerations is to build the capacity of the Iraqis to successfully confront” the Islamic extremists.

The Obama administration has carried out drone strikes against militants in Yemen and Pakistan, where it fears terrorists have been hatching plans to attack the United States. But despite the fact that Sunni militants have been making steady advances and may be carving out new havens from which they could carry out attacks against the West, administration spokesmen have insisted that the United States is not actively considering using warplanes or armed drones to strike them.

Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq’s foreign minister, last year floated the idea that armed American-operated Predator or Reaper drones might be used to respond to the expanding militant network in Iraq. American officials dismissed that suggestion at the time, saying that the request had not come from Mr. Maliki.

By March, however, American experts who visited Baghdad were being told that Iraq’s top leaders were hoping that American air power could be used to strike the militants’ staging and training areas inside Iraq, and help Iraq’s beleaguered forces stop them from crossing into Iraq from Syria.

“Iraqi officials at the highest level said they had requested manned and unmanned U.S. airstrikes this year against ISIS camps in the Jazira desert,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former C.I.A. analyst and National Security Council official, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and who visited Baghdad in early March. ISIS is the acronym for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, as the militant group is known.

As the Sunni insurgents have grown in strength those requests have persisted. In a May 11 meeting with American diplomats and Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the head of the Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East, Mr. Maliki said he would like the United States to provide Iraq with the ability to operate drones. But if the United States was not willing to do that, Mr. Maliki indicated he was prepared to allow the United States to carry out strikes using warplanes or drones.

In a May 16 phone call with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Maliki again suggested that the United States consider using American air power. A written request repeating that point was submitted soon afterward, officials said.

Some experts say that such American military action could be helpful but only if Mr. Maliki takes steps to make his government more inclusive.

“U.S. military support for Iraq could have a positive effect but only if it is conditioned on Maliki changing his behavior within Iraq’s political system,” Mr. Pollack said. “He has to bring the Sunni community back in, agree to limits on his executive authority and agree to reform Iraqi security forces to make them more professional and competent.”

But so far, the administration has signaled that it is not interested in such a direct American military role.

“Ultimately, this is for the Iraqi security forces, and the Iraqi government to deal with,” Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said Tuesday.

The deteriorating situation in Iraq is not what the Obama administration expected when it withdrew the last American troops from there in 2011. In a March 2012 speech, Antony J. Blinken, who is Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser, asserted that “Iraq today is less violent” than “at any time in recent history.”

From the start, experts have stressed that the conflict in Iraq is as much political as military. Mr. Maliki’s failure to include leading Sunnis in his government has heightened the sectarian divisions in Iraq.

But American officials also say that militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria represent a formidable military threat, one that Iraq’s security forces, which lack an effective air force, have been hard pressed to handle on their own.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria grew out of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the militant group that American forces fought during their war there. But while the capabilities of the militants have grown, the Iraq’s military’s effectiveness has diminished.

Adding to that challenge is the fact that the group controls territory on both sides of the Iraqi-Syrian border, and the Iraq and Syria conflicts have been feeding each other.

Said Lakhdar Brahimi, the former United Nations envoy to the collapsed Syria peace talks: “The region is in trouble, starting with Iraq. When I went to Baghdad in December, I was told that for every 100 operations ISIS did in Syria, it did 1,000 in Iraq.”

Critics say the latest developments show the weakness in an administration strategy designed to shore up Iraqi forces and to combat a growing Islamic militancy in Syria that officials say poses an increasing counterterrorism threat to the United States.

In a speech on Wednesday, Susan E. Rice, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, said that the American effort to buttress Iraq’s forces had been effective. “The United States has been fast to provide necessary support for the people and government of Iraq,” she said in remarks at the Center for New American Security in Washington.

The United States has provided a $14 billion foreign military aid package to Iraq that includes F-16 fighter jets, Apache attack helicopters and M-16 rifles. It has rushed hundreds of Hellfire missiles as well as ScanEagle reconnaissance drones.

A second round of counterterrorism training between American Special Operations commandos and Iraqi troops started in Jordan this week. At least two F-16s are set to arrive in Iraq by September, and six Apaches will be leased for training later this year, Iraqi and Pentagon officials said.

But some former generals who served in Iraq said a greater effort was needed.

James M. Dubik, a retired Army lieutenant general who oversaw the training of the Iraqi army during the surge, summed it up this way: “We should fly some of our manned and unmanned aircraft and put advisers into Iraq that can help the Iraqi Army plan and execute a proper defense, then help them transition to a counter offensive.”

Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting from Paris.

A version of this article appears in print on June 12, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline

Iraq Is Said to Seek U.S. Strikes on Insurgents.

    Iraq Said to Seek U.S. Strikes on Militants, NYT, 11.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/12/world/
    middleeast/iraq-asked-us-for-airstrikes-on-militants-officials-say.html

After Capture of Mosul,

Militants Extend Control in Iraq

JUNE 11, 2014
The New York Times
By SUADAD AL-SALHY,
ALAN COWELL
and RICK GLADSTONE

BAGHDAD — Sunni militants who overran the northern Iraqi city of Mosul as government forces crumbled in disarray extended their reach in a lightning advance on Wednesday, pressing south toward Baghdad. They occupied facilities in the strategic oil refining town of Baiji and seized the city of Tikrit with little resistance, security officials and residents said.

By late Wednesday there were unconfirmed reports that the Sunni militants, many aligned with the radical Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, were battling loyalist forces at the northern entrance to the city of Samarra, about 70 miles north of Baghdad. The city is known for a sacred Shiite shrine that was bombed in 2006, during the height of the American-led occupation, touching off bitter sectarian mayhem between the Sunni minority and Shiite majority.

An influential Iraqi Shiite cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, called for the formation of a special force to defend religious sites in Iraq. The authorities in neighboring Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, canceled all visas and flights for pilgrims to Baghdad and intensified border security, Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

Insurgents also raided the Turkish consulate in Mosul and seized the consul general and 47 other Turkish citizens, including special-forces soldiers and three children of diplomats, the Turkish prime minister’s office said. The development raised the possibility that Turkey, a NATO ally that borders both Syria and Iraq, would become directly entangled in the fast-moving crisis.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey was holding an emergency meeting with top security officials on Wednesday to discuss the crisis, and the Turkish foreign minister cut short a trip to New York and was returning to Ankara, government statements said.

Turkey has long taken an interest in northern Iraq for economic reasons and because of the sizable and often restive Kurdish minority, which straddles the border and controls a region of Iraq east of Mosul.

Amid the collapse of the Iraqi army in Mosul, Tikrit and other northern cities, questions began to be raised about the possibility of a conspiracy in the military to deliberately surrender. Witnesses reported some remarkable scenes in Tikrit, where soldiers handed over their weapons and uniforms peacefully to militants who ordinarily would have been expected to kill government soldiers on the spot.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite, himself suggested the possibility of a disloyal military himself in his exhortations on Tuesday for citizens to take up arms against the Sunni insurgents.

Citizens in Baiji, a city of 200,000 about 110 miles south of Mosul, awoke Wednesday to find that government checkpoints had been abandoned and that insurgents, arriving in a column of 60 vehicles, were taking control of parts of the city without firing a shot, the security officials said. Peter Bouckaert, the emergency services director for Human Rights Watch, said in a post on Twitter that the militants had seized the Baiji power station, which supplies electricity to Baghdad, Kirkuk and Salahuddin Province.
Continue reading the main story

In Tikrit, famous as the hometown of Saddam Hussein, residents said the militants attacked in the afternoon from three directions: east, west and north. Residents said there were brief exchanges of gunfire, and then police officers and soldiers shed their uniforms, put on civilian clothing and fled through residential areas to avoid the militants, while others gave up their weapons and uniforms willingly.

The militants’ advance spread alarm in Baghdad, 110 miles south. Though the city seemed calm, residents said they were shocked by the news and feared that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria would push on toward the capital.

Shiite militias and security forces loyal to the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Maliki were on high alert, and residents in Baghdad began stockpiling food, fuel and small arms in fear of a rebel assault. A senior provincial official said the authorities had a plan to recapture Mosul, according to news agency reports, but it was unclear how.

On Wednesday, the insurgents claimed to have taken control of the entire province of Nineveh, Agence France-Presse reported, and there were reports of militants executing government soldiers in the Kirkuk region. Atheel al-Nujaifi, the governor of the province, criticized the Iraqi army commanders in Mosul, saying they had misled the government about the situation in the city.

Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, was quoted on Wednesday as saying his country’s Kurdish minority would “work together” with Baghdad’s forces to “flush out these foreign fighters.”

At a meeting of Arab and European foreign ministers in Athens, Mr. Zebari, himself a Kurd, called the insurgents’ strike “a serious, mortal threat,” adding: “The response has to be soon. There has to be a quick response to what has happened.”

Iraqi Kurds are concentrated in the autonomous region of Kurdistan, where security is maintained by a disciplined and fiercely loyal fighting force, the pesh merga, that has not yet become involved in the latest clashes.

In a further indication of the regional dimensions of the crisis, the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, facing the same jihadist adversary in its civil war against a broader array of armed foes, expressed solidarity with the Iraqi authorities and armed forces, the official SANA news agency reported.

Word of the latest militant advance came as a United Nations agency reported that 500,000 people had fled Mosul — Iraq’s second-largest city, with a population of about 2 million — after the militants, spilling over the border from Syria, captured military bases, police stations, banks and provincial headquarters.

The International Organization for Migration, based in Geneva, said the civilians had mainly fled on foot, because the militants would not let them use vehicles and had taken control of the airport. Roughly the same number were displaced from Anbar Province in western Iraq as the militants gained ground there, the organization said.

On Tuesday the insurgents, reinforced with captured weaponry abandoned by the fleeing government forces, raised their black banner over streets in Mosul littered with the bodies of soldiers, police officers and civilians. The success of the militant attack was the most stunning development in a rapidly widening insurgency straddling the porous border of Iraq and Syria.

Mr. Maliki has ordered a state of emergency for the entire country and called on friendly governments for assistance in a quickly deteriorating situation. His weak central government is struggling to mount a defense, a problem made markedly more dangerous by the defections of hundreds of trained soldiers and the loss of their vehicles, uniforms and weapons.

Security officials said the militant drive toward Baiji began late on Tuesday with brief clashes a few miles north of the town before the insurgents overran a security post, captured vehicles and set buildings on fire.

“They did not kill the soldiers or policemen who handed over their weapons, uniform and their military I.D.,” a security official in Tikrit said on Wednesday before the militants reached that city; he spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They just took these things and asked them to leave,” the official said.

The swift advances offered a new milestone in Iraq’s unraveling since the withdrawal of American forces at the end of 2011.

The rising insurgency also presented a new quandary for the Obama administration, which has faced sharp criticism for its recent swap of five Taliban officers for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl and must now answer questions about the death of five Americans by friendly fire in Afghanistan on Monday night.

Critics have long contended that America’s withdrawal of troops from Iraq, without leaving even a token force, invited an insurgent revival.

Suadad al-Sahly reported from Baghdad,

Alan Cowell from London and Rick Gladstone from New York.

Tim Arango and Sebnem Arsu contributed

reporting from Istanbul, and Thomas Erdbrink from Tehran.

    After Capture of Mosul, Militants Extend Control in Iraq,
    NYT, 11.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/12/world/middleeast/iraq.html

Killings in Iraq, at 799,

Reach a Monthly High

 

JUNE 1, 2014
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BAGHDAD — Violence claimed the lives of 799 Iraqis in May, the highest monthly death toll so far this year, the United Nations said Sunday, underlining the daunting challenges the Iraqi government faces as it struggles to contain a surge in sectarian violence.

The figures issued by the United Nations mission to Iraq put last month’s civilian death toll at 603, with 196 members of security forces killed. The mission added that 1,409 Iraqis, including 1,108 civilians, were wounded. The previous month’s death toll stood at 750, making April the second deadliest month of the year.

Despite the constant militant attacks that have left a vital oil pipeline idle, Iraq’s crude oil exports increased slightly in May, the Oil Ministry said Sunday. The worst-hit city was the capital, Baghdad, with 315 people killed. The northern province of Nineveh came in second with 113, followed by nearby Salahuddin Province with 94.

The figures exclude deaths in Anbar Province, where militants have controlled parts of the provincial capital, Ramadi, and nearby Falluja since December.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a powerful affiliate of Al Qaeda that also operates in neighboring Syria, has intensified its attacks across Iraq as political rivals work to form a new government after parliamentary elections on April 30.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s bloc emerged as the biggest winner, securing 92 seats in the 328-member Parliament, but it failed to gain the majority needed to govern alone.

“I strongly deplore the sustained level of violence and terrorist acts that continues rocking the country,” the United Nations special representative in Iraq, Nickolay Mladenov, said in a statement.

“I urge the political leaders to work swiftly for the formation of an inclusive government within the constitutionally mandated time frame and focus on a substantive solution to the situation in Anbar,” he said.

Last year, the death toll climbed to its highest levels since the worst of the sectarian strife in 2006 and 2007, when the country was on the brink of civil war. The United Nations says 8,868 people were killed in 2013.

The 2011 withdrawal of American forces, which for eight years had often acted as a buffer between Shiites and Sunnis, is thought to have contributed to the rise in violence, in addition to the use of deadly force by the Shiite-led security forces against Sunni protesters.

The violence is a constant threat to disrupt Iraq’s economy, but the country’s oil exports averaged 2.6 million barrels a day last month, an increase from the 2.5 million barrels per day in April, said a ministry spokesman, Assem Jihad. Mr. Jihad said the sales grossed about $8 billion monthly, based on an average price of $100.08 per barrel. April’s revenues stood at about $7.6 billion.

He added that all the oil was exported through the country’s facilities on the Persian Gulf because the pipeline that goes to Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan has been idle since March as a result of terrorist attacks. The pipeline, which pumps 300,000 to 400,000 barrels a day and traverses the restive Sunni-dominated areas of northern Iraq, has been a favorite target for militants.

Iraq holds the world’s fourth largest oil reserves, about 143 billion barrels. Insurgent attacks, infrastructure bottlenecks and disputes with the northern self-ruled Kurdish region over rights to develop natural resources have been the main obstacles to Iraq’s increasing oil production and exports.

In 2009, the Kurds contributed oil officially for the first time through a Baghdad-controlled pipeline, but shipments were interrupted many times over payment disputes. Last month, the dispute took a new turn when the region decided to unilaterally export oil through an independent pipeline.

Iraq has been struggling to develop its oil and gas sectors since the American-led invasion in 2003, when the deteriorating security situation scared many investors away. Daily oil production and exports have climbed steadily since 2011, nearly two years after Iraq awarded rights to develop its major oil fields to international oil companies. Oil revenues make up nearly 95 percent of Iraq’s budget.

A version of this article appears in print on June 2, 2014,

on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline:

Killings in Iraq, at 799, Reach a Monthly High.

    Killings in Iraq, at 799, Reach a Monthly High, NYT, 1.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/world/
    middleeast/killings-in-iraq-reach-a-record-high.html

N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces

From Web Images

MAY 31, 2014
The New York Times
By JAMES RISEN
and LAURA POITRAS

The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.

The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.

The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential,” according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. While once focused on written and oral communications, the N.S.A. now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the documents show.

“It’s not just the traditional communications we’re after: It’s taking a full-arsenal approach that digitally exploits the clues a target leaves behind in their regular activities on the net to compile biographic and biometric information” that can help “implement precision targeting,” noted a 2010 document.

One N.S.A. PowerPoint presentation from 2011, for example, displays several photographs of an unidentified man — sometimes bearded, other times clean-shaven — in different settings, along with more than two dozen data points about him. These include whether he was on the Transportation Security Administration no-fly list, his passport and visa status, known associates or suspected terrorist ties, and comments made about him by informants to American intelligence agencies.

It is not clear how many people around the world, and how many Americans, might have been caught up in the effort. Neither federal privacy laws nor the nation’s surveillance laws provide specific protections for facial images. Given the N.S.A.’s foreign intelligence mission, much of the imagery would involve people overseas whose data was scooped up through cable taps, Internet hubs and satellite transmissions.

Because the agency considers images a form of communications content, the N.S.A. would be required to get court approval for imagery of Americans collected through its surveillance programs, just as it must to read their emails or eavesdrop on their phone conversations, according to an N.S.A. spokeswoman. Cross-border communications in which an American might be emailing or texting an image to someone targeted by the agency overseas could be excepted.

Civil-liberties advocates and other critics are concerned that the power of the improving technology, used by government and industry, could erode privacy. “Facial recognition can be very invasive,” said Alessandro Acquisti, a researcher on facial recognition technology at Carnegie Mellon University. “There are still technical limitations on it, but the computational power keeps growing, and the databases keep growing, and the algorithms keep improving.”
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State and local law enforcement agencies are relying on a wide range of databases of facial imagery, including driver’s licenses and Facebook, to identify suspects. The F.B.I. is developing what it calls its “next generation identification” project to combine its automated fingerprint identification system with facial imagery and other biometric data.

The State Department has what several outside experts say could be the largest facial imagery database in the federal government, storing hundreds of millions of photographs of American passport holders and foreign visa applicants. And the Department of Homeland Security is funding pilot projects at police departments around the country to match suspects against faces in a crowd.

The N.S.A., though, is unique in its ability to match images with huge troves of private communications.

“We would not be doing our job if we didn’t seek ways to continuously improve the precision of signals intelligence activities — aiming to counteract the efforts of valid foreign intelligence targets to disguise themselves or conceal plans to harm the United States and its allies,” said Vanee M. Vines, the agency spokeswoman.

She added that the N.S.A. did not have access to photographs in state databases of driver’s licenses or to passport photos of Americans, while declining to say whether the agency had access to the State Department database of photos of foreign visa applicants. She also declined to say whether the N.S.A. collected facial imagery of Americans from Facebook and other social media through means other than communications intercepts.

“The government and the private sector are both investing billions of dollars into face recognition” research and development, said Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer and expert on facial recognition and privacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. “The government leads the way in developing huge face recognition databases, while the private sector leads in accurately identifying people under challenging conditions.”

Ms. Lynch said a handful of recent court decisions could lead to new constitutional protections for the privacy of sensitive face recognition data. But she added that the law was still unclear and that Washington was operating largely in a legal vacuum.

Laura Donohue, the director of the Center on National Security and the Law at Georgetown Law School, agreed. “There are very few limits on this,” she said.

Congress has largely ignored the issue. “Unfortunately, our privacy laws provide no express protections for facial recognition data,” said Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, in a letter in December to the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is now studying possible standards for commercial, but not governmental, use.

Facial recognition technology can still be a clumsy tool. It has difficulty matching low-resolution images, and photographs of people’s faces taken from the side or angles can be impossible to match against mug shots or other head-on photographs.

Dalila B. Megherbi, an expert on facial recognition technology at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, explained that “when pictures come in different angles, different resolutions, that all affects the facial recognition algorithms in the software.”

That can lead to errors, the documents show. A 2011 PowerPoint showed one example when Tundra Freeze, the N.S.A.’s main in-house facial recognition program, was asked to identify photos matching the image of a bearded young man with dark hair. The document says the program returned 42 results, and displays several that were obviously false hits, including one of a middle-age man.

Similarly, another 2011 N.S.A. document reported that a facial recognition system was queried with a photograph of Osama bin Laden. Among the search results were photos of four other bearded men with only slight resemblances to Bin Laden.

But the technology is powerful. One 2011 PowerPoint showed how the software matched a bald young man, shown posing with another man in front of a water park, with another photo where he has a full head of hair, wears different clothes and is at a different location.

It is not clear how many images the agency has acquired. The N.S.A. does not collect facial imagery through its bulk metadata collection programs, including that involving Americans’ domestic phone records, authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, according to Ms. Vines.

The N.S.A. has accelerated its use of facial recognition technology under the Obama administration, the documents show, intensifying its efforts after two intended attacks on Americans that jarred the White House. The first was the case of the so-called underwear bomber, in which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, tried to trigger a bomb hidden in his underwear while flying to Detroit on Christmas in 2009. Just a few months later, in May 2010, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American, attempted a car bombing in Times Square.

The agency’s use of facial recognition technology goes far beyond one program previously reported by The Guardian, which disclosed that the N.S.A. and its British counterpart, General Communications Headquarters, have jointly intercepted webcam images, including sexually explicit material, from Yahoo users.

The N.S.A. achieved a technical breakthrough in 2010 when analysts first matched images collected separately in two databases — one in a huge N.S.A. database code-named Pinwale, and another in the government’s main terrorist watch list database, known as Tide — according to N.S.A. documents. That ability to cross-reference images has led to an explosion of analytical uses inside the agency. The agency has created teams of “identity intelligence” analysts who work to combine the facial images with other records about individuals to develop comprehensive portraits of intelligence targets.

The agency has developed sophisticated ways to integrate facial recognition programs with a wide range of other databases. It intercepts video teleconferences to obtain facial imagery, gathers airline passenger data and collects photographs from national identity card databases created by foreign countries, the documents show. They also note that the N.S.A. was attempting to gain access to such databases in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The documents suggest that the agency has considered getting access to iris scans through its phone and email surveillance programs. But asked whether the agency is now doing so, officials declined to comment. The documents also indicate that the N.S.A. collects iris scans of foreigners through other means.

In addition, the agency was working with the C.I.A. and the State Department on a program called Pisces, collecting biometric data on border crossings from a wide range of countries.

One of the N.S.A.’s broadest efforts to obtain facial images is a program called Wellspring, which strips out images from emails and other communications, and displays those that might contain passport images. In addition to in-house programs, the N.S.A. relies in part on commercially available facial recognition technology, including from PittPatt, a small company owned by Google, the documents show.

The N.S.A. can now compare spy satellite photographs with intercepted personal photographs taken outdoors to determine the location. One document shows what appear to be vacation photographs of several men standing near a small waterfront dock in 2011. It matches their surroundings to a spy satellite image of the same dock taken about the same time, located at what the document describes as a militant training facility in Pakistan.

A version of this article appears in print on June 1, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images.

    N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images,
    NYT, 31.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/
    nsa-collecting-millions-of-faces-from-web-images.html

President Obama and the World

MAY 3, 2014
SundayReview | Editorial
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Two years after winning an election in which foreign policy was barely mentioned, President Obama is being pummeled at home and abroad for his international leadership. The world sometimes seems as if it is flying apart, with Mr. Obama unable to fix it. Through a combination of a few significant missteps, circumstances beyond his control, unreasonable expectations and his maddeningly bland demeanor, Mr. Obama has opened himself to criticism that he is not articulating a strong, overarching blueprint for the exercise of American power and has not been able to bend authoritarian leaders to his will.

It is paradoxical that, in key respects, Mr. Obama is precisely the kind of foreign policy president most Americans and their allies overseas wanted. He rejected the shoot-first tendencies of George W. Bush, who pretended to have all the answers, bungled two wars and asserted an in-your-face American exceptionalism that included bullying allies. We know where that got us.

But Mr. Obama has long been fully responsible for his own foreign policy. While he has made mistakes, and can be frustratingly cautious, he has done a better job than his detractors allow, starting with salvaging an economy that is at the core of American power. He has produced the first possibility of a deal on Iran’s nuclear weapons. Even though shrinking budgets and a public that is tired of war and unconvinced of the need for international engagement have undoubtedly put a check on his ambitions, talk of America shrinking from the world is overblown.

Still, too often, Mr. Obama’s ambitions seem in question. It does not feel as if he is exercising sufficient American leadership and power, even if he is in fact working to solve a problem. Some analysts have suggested he lacks a passion for foreign policy. Others say he has no inspiring ideological prism through which the world can understand his choices. Others say he is too resigned to the obstacles that prevent the United States from being able to control world events as easily as it may once have done. These criticisms have some truth to them, and Mr. Obama sometimes makes things worse when he deigns to explain himself.

By last week, when he was in the Philippines defensively talking about his inability to affect outcomes in places like Syria, Egypt and Israel, he offered a sadly pinched view of the powers of his office. “You hit singles, you hit doubles; every once in a while we may be able to hit a home run,” Mr. Obama said. You don’t inspire a team to go out and bloop a single over an infielder. American presidents who stood as strong global leaders did so by setting high expectations in clear, if sometimes overly simplistic, ways. Mr. Obama’s comments last week fanned the anger of people on the left and the right who find him unfocused, weak and passive.

What follows is an examination of some of the world’s problems, the areas where Mr. Obama has done well, and the areas where he has stumbled.
Continue reading the main story

 

THE TRANSFORMATION TRAP Mr. Obama positioned himself as a transformational leader, but in foreign affairs, as in domestic policy, he overestimated the degree to which the mere fact of his election could achieve that transformation. He has run up against the realities of a chaotic and increasingly multipolar world. As a senator running for president in 2008, Mr. Obama spoke of a “new strategy for a new world” that focused on nuclear disarmament and ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also promised the United States is “ready to lead again.” When he won his premature Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, Mr. Obama explained his belief in just wars, including those waged on humanitarian grounds.

It is tempting to dismiss criticism from right-wing Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz, who knows little about foreign policy; from Senator John McCain, who knows quite a lot but advocates a military response to almost every crisis; and from former Bush officials. They have an interest in seeing this president fail. It was disquieting to hear some Republicans speak almost admiringly about Vladimir Putin’s macho boldness when the Russian president invaded Crimea. There was a time when both political parties saw real value in cooperating to advance America’s security interests, and the country was better for it.

But there is also powerful criticism from Democrats, liberals and centrists, who fault Mr. Obama’s handling of Syria (some want airstrikes, some want more weapons for rebels) and Ukraine (many want weapons for the government). His critics are inconsistent in their philosophies and have failed to offer cogent alternatives to Mr. Obama’s policies. But the perception — of weakness, dithering, inaction, there are many names for it — has indisputably had a negative effect on Mr. Obama’s global standing.

 

RED LINES Mr. Obama has been right to avoid direct military involvement in Syria, even though the horrors there — more than 150,000 killed, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria denying aid to starving people, the rise of jihadi groups — have worsened. But he bungled the Assad government’s chemical weapons attack against civilians last year (vowing there was a “red line” and then allowing it to be crossed), and that has left doubts about his willingness to use force in other circumstances.

Mr. Obama made the right choice when he went for a diplomatic solution, under which Syria’s chemical arms stockpile is being dismantled. But did he learn that no president should threaten military action and make a public case for it unless he plans to follow through? America has provided the most humanitarian aid to beleaguered Syrians and led the push for a diplomatic solution to the war. That failed in large measure because Russia and Iran are enabling Mr. Assad. Now, according to news reports, the administration has begun to provide certain rebels with more lethal weapons; the shipments should be monitored and halted if there is evidence of diversion.

 

USE OF FORCE Mr. Obama has delivered on his promise to end the American-led war in Iraq and is withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, although too slowly. He has committed to pursue diplomacy first and war as a last resort, but he is no pacifist. Mr. Obama joined France and Britain in military strikes to aid rebels in ousting Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, authorized the killing of Osama bin Laden and — to a degree that is far too excessive — shifted military actions to the shadows by authorizing drone campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

He has asserted the right to order the killing even of Americans who plot against this country abroad. In Asia on April 24, he gave assurances that America’s treaty commitments to Japan included defending islands disputed with China. Accusations that he is soft on terrorism are simply without merit. In fact, his policies are too similar to his predecessor’s for our comfort.
 

RUSSIA AND UKRAINE When he came to office, Mr. Obama was right to pursue a better relationship with Russia. He has not acted precipitously since Mr. Putin displayed his true colors by invading Crimea and destabilizing eastern Ukraine. Instead, he gave Mr. Putin a diplomatic option that would allow him to back down and then, when Putin did not take it, imposed sanctions on Russians and Ukrainians connected to the turmoil.

Suggestions from the right that Mr. Obama should somehow use the military, or at least the threat of it, against Russia over Ukraine are irresponsible, to put it politely. Mr. Obama’s efforts to work with Europe on tougher sanctions have the best chance of restraining Russia.

But that takes time, and the Europeans, entwined economically with Russia, are balking at adding new sanctions, even as Mr. Putin gobbles up more of Ukraine. A lot is riding on Mr. Obama’s ability to lead the trans-Atlantic response, which includes strengthening Ukraine politically and economically, reasserting international law, and forcing Russia to reconsider its campaign to turn Ukraine into a failed, partitioned state. Mr. Obama has rejected arming the Ukrainians but has beefed up military assets in nearby NATO member countries. He should consider unilaterally imposing more sanctions if the Europeans continue temporizing.

 

IRAN’S NUCLEAR AMBITION One of Mr. Obama’s most promising initiatives is working with other major powers on a deal to ensure Iran does not build nuclear weapons. An interim agreement, reached last November, has decreased Iran’s ability to produce a weapon quickly, and a final deal is expected by the end of July. While that is anything but guaranteed, Mr. Obama deserves credit for taking the risk of engaging with Iran, and for persuading Congress to hold off on actions that could threaten the negotiations. Now he has to deal with members of Congress who say they want to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power but do everything they can to stymie any agreement.

 

THE ASIAN PUZZLE With his recent trip to Asia , Mr. Obama breathed new life into his commitment to focus more of America’s attention on the world’s most economically dynamic region. The trip produced a military base agreement with the Philippines, improved relations with Malaysia, and, officials say, progress during talks in Japan on a 12-nation trade deal. That will be crucial to making his Asia rebalance policy a success and demonstrating that it involves more than a military hedge against China. One country to which he should pay far more attention is India.

 

ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS Mr. Obama showed leadership in empowering Secretary of State John Kerry to undertake a nine-month negotiation on an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal after fumbling badly with his first peacemaking overture in 2009. The second effort, which seemed better prepared, is now in tatters and seems unlikely to be revived soon. But it demonstrated a serious American commitment and was still worth it, especially if it results in a set of American principles that point the way to a peace deal if the two sides ever muster the will to agree on one.

 

THE ARAB TURMOIL More than anything else, perhaps, the revolutions in this region have demonstrated the limits of American influence when countries are in turmoil. Egypt is the most important and difficult case. While it is an example of the realpolitik that some of his critics say Mr. Obama lacks, Egypt is Exhibit A in the case against his claim to be supporting democracy in the Middle East. The Obama administration finds itself defending and continuing to finance a repressive military government in Cairo that comes nowhere near to fulfilling the promise of the Arab Spring and that recently ordered more than 1,000 political prisoners put to death.

Taken as a whole and stripped as much as possible of ideological blinkers, Mr. Obama’s record on foreign policy is not as bad as his critics say. It’s just not good enough.

A version of this editorial appears in print on May 4, 2014,

on page SR10 of the New York edition with the headline:

President Obama and the World.

    President Obama and the World, NYT, 3.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/opinion/sunday/
    president-obama-and-the-world.html

Ending Asia Trip,

Obama Defends His Foreign Policy

APRIL 28, 2014
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER

MANILA — President Obama, stung by criticism of his response to turmoil from Eastern Europe to the Middle East, defended his approach to foreign policy as a slow but steady pursuit of American interests while avoiding military conflict, and he lashed out at those he said reflexively call for the use of force.

Standing next to the Philippine president, Benigno S. Aquino III, a visibly frustrated Mr. Obama said on Monday that his critics had failed to learn the lessons of the Iraq war.

On a day in which he announced new sanctions against Russia for its continued threats to Ukraine, Mr. Obama said his foreign policy was based on a workmanlike tending to American priorities that might lack the high drama of a wartime presidency but also avoided ruinous mistakes.

“You hit singles, you hit doubles; every once in a while we may be able to hit a home run,” Mr. Obama said at a news conference with Mr. Aquino. “But we steadily advance the interests of the American people and our partnership with folks around the world.”

Mr. Obama’s statement, delivered at the end of a weeklong trip to Asia, was a rare insight into a second-term president already sizing up his legacy as a statesman. By turns angry and rueful, his words suggested the distance he had traveled from the confident young leader who accepted a Nobel Peace Prize with a speech about the occasional necessity of war.

While he flatly rejected the Republican portrait of him as feckless in the face of crises like Syria, Mr. Obama seemed to be wrestling with a more nuanced critique, that aside from one or two swings for the fences — the nuclear negotiations with Iran, for example — his foreign policy had become a game of small ball.

Mr. Obama offered this trip as Exhibit A for the virtues of an incremental approach: He nudged along trade negotiations with Japan, consoled a bereaved ally in South Korea, cultivated ties with a once-hostile Malaysia and signed a modest defense agreement with the Philippines.

He drew a sharp contrast between the international coalition the United States had marshaled to pressure President Vladimir V. Putin and the proposals of some Republicans to funnel weapons to Ukrainian soldiers, which he mocked as ineffective.

“Why is it that everybody is so eager to use military force,” Mr. Obama said, “after we’ve just gone through a decade of war at enormous cost to our troops and to our budget. And what is it exactly that these critics think would have been accomplished?”

The president did not name his critics, except to refer to them as foreign policy commentators “in an office in Washington or New York.” He also referred to the Sunday morning talk shows, where Senator John McCain of Arizona, a fierce Obama critic, is a ubiquitous guest.

“If we took all of the actions that our critics have demanded, we’d lose count of the number of military conflicts that America would be engaged in,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser.

These days, one crisis follows on the heels of another. Even Mr. Obama’s Asian trip, which he had put off from October because of the government shutdown, was overshadowed by the tensions with Russia and the suspension of peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians.

When Mr. Obama returns to Washington on Tuesday, his advisers say, he wants to regain the offensive with several speeches, most notably a graduation address at the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., next month, in which he will try to place his decisions on Syria, Ukraine and other crises into a broader context.

He has done this before. In December 2009, when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, the president made a case for the responsible use of military force when responding to a terrorist attack, as in Afghanistan, or when looking to prevent the brutalization of a population, as in Libya.

Mr. Obama has not hesitated to use drones to target suspected terrorists in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, showing an appetite for shadow warfare that surprised many of his supporters.

But the president’s profound reluctance to get drawn into Syria’s civil war shows no sign of wavering. For critics ranging from Mr. McCain to human rights activists, it has come to symbolize the erosion of America’s leadership role in the world during the Obama presidency.

White House officials counter that they are forging ahead on other fronts, like the nuclear negotiations with Iran and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a regional trade pact that Mr. Obama promoted in Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines.

“There is a tendency to view all of American foreign policy through the prism of the most difficult crisis of the day, rather than taking the longer view,” Mr. Rhodes said.

The president’s frustration flared during the first news conference of his trip, with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan. He was asked if, by declaring that the United States would protect disputed islands in the East China Sea under its security treaty with Japan, he risked drawing another “red line,” like the one in Syria over chemical weapons.

“The implication of the question I think is, is that each and every time a country violates one of those norms the United States should go to war, or stand prepared to engage militarily, and if it doesn’t then somehow we’re not serious about those norms,” he said. “Well, that’s not the case.”

In the case of Syria, Mr. Obama noted that after he canceled a threatened missile strike, the United States cobbled together a deal with Russia to remove Syria’s chemical munitions. As of last week, he said, 87 percent of President Bashar al-Assad’s stockpile of chemical weapons had been removed.

“The fact that we didn’t have to fire a missile to get that accomplished is not a failure to uphold those international norms, it’s a success,” the president said, adding, “It’s not a complete success until we have the last 13 percent out.”

Mr. Obama challenged those who say the United States must take some kind of military action in Syria. “They themselves say, ‘No, no, no, we don’t mean sending in troops.’ Well, what do you mean?” he asked.

The same dialogue occurs with Russia and Ukraine. Nobody is seriously advocating sending American troops, he said, but some want to arm the Ukrainians.

“Do people actually think that somehow us sending some additional arms into Ukraine could potentially deter the Russian Army?” Mr. Obama said. “Or are we more likely to deter them by applying the sort of international pressure, diplomatic pressure and economic pressure that we’re applying?”

Despite his frustrations, Mr. Obama had some small victories in Asia. The 10-year deal with the Philippines will give American troops, ships and planes expanded access to bases here, something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, after fierce public opposition forced the United States to relinquish its Subic Bay naval base.

Administration officials said they had made important progress on a trade deal with Japan, even if it was not ready to be announced by Mr. Obama and Mr. Abe. And by all accounts, Mr. Obama managed to reassure America’s treaty allies without antagonizing China.

After offering an earnest discussion of America’s relationships with various Southeast Asian nations, the president said that kind of foreign policy “may not always be sexy” and “it doesn’t make for good argument on Sunday morning shows — but it avoids errors.”

For Mr. Obama, who spent some of his childhood years in Indonesia, Southeast Asia is normally a place to slow down to its tropical rhythms. Not this time: After his impassioned answer to a question on his foreign policy record from Ed Henry, a Fox News White House correspondent, Mr. Obama said, “You got me all worked up.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 29, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Ending Asia Trip, Obama Defends Foreign Policy.

    Ending Asia Trip, Obama Defends His Foreign Policy, NYT, 2.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/29/world/
    obama-defends-foreign-policy-against-critics.html

U.S. Expands Sanctions,

Adding Holdings of Russians

in Putin’s Financial Circle

APRIL 28, 2014
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — The United States added new sanctions against Russia on Monday, expanding the list of targets but concentrating on the myriad holdings of four billionaires viewed as part of President Vladimir V. Putin’s financial circle.

Accusing Russia of failing to live up to its agreement to defuse the crisis in Ukraine, the Obama administration took aim at 17 banks, energy companies, investment accounts and other firms controlled by the four men, in what amounted to an attempt to constrain the assets available to Mr. Putin’s close associates and perhaps to the president himself.

Although the measures do not explicitly target Mr. Putin, American officials indicated that the choice of targets was intended to send a message to him that any hidden assets he might have could ultimately be affected.

In addition to the firms, the administration imposed sanctions on seven other prominent Russian figures, including two longtime Putin advisers: Igor I. Sechin, president of the state-owned Rosneft oil company, and Sergei V. Chemezov, the director general of Rostec, the Russian state corporation overseeing high-technology industries. The European Union said it would follow with sanctions on 15 Russians.

“The goal here is not to go after Mr. Putin personally,” President Obama told reporters in Manila, where he was wrapping up a weeklong trip to Asia. “The goal is to change his calculus” and “to encourage him to actually walk the walk and not just talk the talk when it comes to diplomatically resolving the crisis in Ukraine.”

The sanctions follow several previous rounds of punitive measures that to date have not noticeably changed Mr. Putin’s calculus, and American officials privately expected no different result in the short term.

“We don’t expect there to be an immediate change in Russian policy,” said one administration official, briefing reporters under ground rules in which he would not be identified. “What we need to do is to steadily show the Russians that there are going to be much more severe economic pain” and isolation.

Administration officials, including some in the more hawkish camp, said the new sanctions were a more serious effort than earlier rounds. Some said the “secondary effects” of chilling business with those targeted were becoming more significant, and they expressed optimism that the Europeans were more willing to talk about tougher measures after a team of European military observers was taken captive by pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine.

Mr. Obama will host Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany at the White House later this week to coordinate whatever the next steps will be against Mr. Putin’s government. Ms. Merkel, whose country has extensive economic, cultural and historical ties to Russia, is seen as the linchpin of any coordinated effort, and Mr. Obama has made it his priority to maintain a united front with the Europeans against Russia.

Critics called the latest sanctions inadequate. “I expected more from these U.S. sanctions,” said Cliff Kupchan, a Russia analyst at the Eurasia Group, a firm that advises businesses. “To have a shot at changing Putin’s calculus, we’ve got to get serious on economic measures — at least hit a large Russian bank. We missed the target today.”

Anders Aslund, a Russia scholar at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the sanctions were “a whimper” after the tough talk by Mr. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry.

But he added that the intent was clearly to send a message to Mr. Putin about any hidden wealth. “This is going after Putin personally, not the Russian economy,” Mr. Aslund said. “And it’s telling him we know where you have your money. We don’t need to sanction you personally.”

The actions will freeze any assets in the United States and bar Americans from doing business with the individuals and firms listed. The individuals will also be denied visas to enter the United States. Moreover, the United States will cut off the export or re-export of American-made products to 13 of the companies and deny export licenses for high-technology items that could contribute to Russia’s military capabilities.

The 17 firms targeted were all tied to Russian businessmen who were targeted in previous rounds of sanctions. Eleven of the companies are linked to Gennady N. Timchenko, including the Stroytransgaz Group, the pipeline construction arm of Gazprom, and the Volga Group, his private investment holding company. Mr. Timchenko was a co-founder of the Gunvor Group, a commodities trading firm in which the Treasury Department has previously said Mr. Putin has personal investments. Gunvor has adamantly denied that Mr. Putin has any financial ties to the company, and Mr. Timchenko has sold his shares in Gunvor.

Three other firms targeted on Monday were tied to Arkady and Boris Rotenberg: InvestCapitalBank, SMP Bank and Stroygazmontazh. Three others were subsidiaries of Yuri V. Kovalchuk’s Bank Rossyia: Abros, Zest and Sobinbank. The Treasury Department has referred to Mr. Kovalchuk as the personal cashier for Mr. Putin.

Others targeted Monday were Dmitri N. Kozak, a deputy prime minister; Vyacheslav V. Volodin, a deputy chief of staff to Mr. Putin; Aleksei Pushkov, chairman of the international affairs committee of the State Duma, the lower house of Parliament; Oleg Belavantsev, appointed by Mr. Putin last month as presidential envoy overseeing the annexed Crimean Peninsula; and Yevgeny Murov, director of Russia’s Federal Protective Service.

Although administration officials said over the weekend that they also expected Aleksei B. Miller, the head of the energy giant Gazprom, to be targeted, he was not on Monday’s list, but he may be added later.

“Today’s targeted sanctions, taken in close coordination with the E.U., will increase the impact we have already begun to see on Russia’s own economy as a result of Russia’s actions in Ukraine and from U.S. and international sanctions,” Jacob J. Lew, the Treasury secretary, said in a statement.

In imposing sanctions on Mr. Sechin, the administration has targeted a top partner of Exxon Mobil, which has multiple joint ventures with Rosneft. It is not known if Mr. Sechin has any assets in the United States to freeze, but he will no longer be permitted into the country to consult with his Exxon Mobil partners. Exxon Mobil had no comment on Monday.

That the sanctions covered no large publicly listed Russian companies came as a relief to traders in Moscow. Russia’s benchmark Micex index closed with a modest gain of 1.5 percent. “It looked to be on the light side” of what the markets expected, said one banker in Moscow, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “This was more of a reminder that a new phase of sanctions is possible.”

Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Moscow,

and Mark Landler from Manila.

A version of this article appears in print on April 29, 2014,

on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline:

U.S. Expands Sanctions, Adding Holdings of Russians

in Putin’s Financial Circle.

    U.S. Expands Sanctions, Adding Holdings of Russians in Putin’s Financial Circle,
    NYT, 28.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/29/world/asia/obama-sanctions-russia.html

Kerry Apologizes for Remark

That Israel Risks Apartheid

APRIL 28, 2014
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State John Kerry issued an unusual statement Monday evening expressing his support for Israel after a controversy erupted over a politically charged phrase he used in a private appearance.

Speaking to a closed-door meeting of the Trilateral Commission last week, Mr. Kerry said that if a Middle East peace agreement was not achieved, Israel risked becoming an “apartheid state,” according to an article in The Daily Beast, an online publication. The comments were noted in the Israeli news media and were severely criticized by some American Jewish organizations.

“Any suggestion that Israel is, or is at risk of becoming, an apartheid state is offensive and inappropriate,” the American Israel Public Affairs Committee said. “Israel is the lone stable democracy in the Middle East, protects the rights of minorities regardless of ethnicity or religion.”

Republican lawmakers were also critical. Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican and possible presidential contender, said Mr. Kerry’s comments were “outrageous and disappointing.”

During his push for a comprehensive peace agreement, Mr. Kerry has repeatedly warned that Israel could face economic pressure from European nations as well as Palestinian violence and a demographic time bomb at home — meaning Jews could become a minority in Israel and the territories they control — if Israel did not negotiate an agreement that led to an independent Palestinian state.

His recent comments came at a particularly sensitive moment with the peace talks put off, after Israel’s decision to suspend negotiations because of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s announcement of its reconciliation with Hamas, the Islamic militant group that governs Gaza.

In the statement that Mr. Kerry issued Monday, which bore the title “On Support for Israel,” he said that he had been a staunch supporter of Israel during his years as a senator and had spent many hours since working with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials.

“For more than 30 years in the United States Senate, I didn’t just speak words in support of Israel,” Mr. Kerry said in his statement. “I walked the walk when it came time to vote and when it came time to fight.”

Mr. Kerry added that he did not believe that Israel was an “apartheid state” or intended to become one. Mr. Kerry did not dispute he had used the phrase but said it had led to a “misimpression” about his views.

“If I could rewind the tape, I would have chosen a different word to describe my firm belief that the only way in the long term to have a Jewish state and two nations and two peoples living side by side in peace and security is through a two state solution,” he said.

“In the long term, a unitary, binational state cannot be the democratic Jewish state that Israel deserves or the prosperous state with full rights that the Palestinian people deserve,” he added.

J Street, a pro-peace Jewish organization, defended Mr. Kerry. “Instead of putting energy into attacking Secretary Kerry, those who are upset with the secretary’s use of the term should put their energy into opposing and changing the policies that are leading Israel down this road,” it said in a statement.

But Aaron David Miller, a former American peace negotiator now at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said that Mr. Kerry’s comment had drawn him into an “unproductive fight with a close ally.”

“Baker and Kissinger used tough language when they thought they would not only be able to make a point, but would be able to make a difference,” Mr. Miller said of James A. Baker III and Henry A. Kissinger, both former secretaries of state. “But Kerry’s closed-door comment was ill timed, ill advised and unwise.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 29, 2014,

on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline:

Kerry Apologizes for Remark That Israel Risks Apartheid.

    Kerry Apologizes for Remark That Israel Risks Apartheid, NYT, 28.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/29/world/middleeast/
    kerry-apologizes-for-remark-that-israel-risks-apartheid.html

Iraqi Militants Stage Political Rally,

Then Bombs Go Off

 

APRIL 25, 2014
The New York Times
By TIM ARANGO and DURAID ADNAN

BAGHDAD — A campaign rally at a ramshackle old soccer stadium on Friday afternoon began with open-air theater that crossed centuries of Shiite lore, from the martyrdom of a revered religious figure to the fight today against Sunni extremists, played by actors dressed as fighters for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a radical Islamist group.

It ended with an outbreak of violence, three explosions, one after the other, in the parking lot, as thousands of people were leaving: a car bomb, a suicide bomber and a roadside bomb. More than 30 people were killed and many others wounded in an attack that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria said in a statement it had carried out.

The bombings struck a rally held by a Shiite militant group, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, that is trying to transform itself into a political force by fielding candidates in Iraq’s coming national elections. But rather than emphasize empowerment through politics, the rally and the subsequent Sunni militant attack underscored two troubling realities of today’s Iraq: the merging of the civil war in Syria with Iraq’s own strengthened Sunni insurgency and the rising influence of Iran, the event organizers’ most important patron.
Photo
A wounded man was helped after a political rally in Baghdad was bombed on Friday. Over 30 people were killed. Credit Thaier Al-Sudani/Reuters

The event at times felt more like a wartime rally than a political event, especially with boasting by Asaib Ahl al-Haq that it was sending its members to fight in the Syrian civil war.

Festooned around the stadium were banners bearing the names and faces of the men the group had lost in Syria, more than 80 names in all. Men in militia uniforms — green camouflage with Asaib Ahl al-Haq patches on the sleeves — some of them just back from the battlefield in Syria, lined the track surrounding the soccer field. As the group’s parliamentary candidates filed into the stadium, a campaign song played through scratchy stereo speakers.

“We send real men to Syria,” was one verse.

“We are protecting Zeinab,” was another, a reference to an important Shiite shrine in Syria.

Just before the formal program was to begin, the group’s leader, Qais al-Khazali, rode into the stadium in a convoy of black armored sport utility vehicles, black-suited security men hanging off the sides. Mr. Khazali was once a lieutenant for another cleric and militia leader who was also an implacable foe to the Americans, Moktada al-Sadr. Now Mr. Khazali commands his own movement that will compete for Mr. Sadr’s constituency among the Shiite underclass in the elections, scheduled for Wednesday.

On Friday he stepped to the podium and began by reciting the names of fighters killed in Syria.

“You are the reason we are here today,” he said. “And we will accomplish what you have died for.”

Then he addressed his men who are still fighting in Syria.

“To those that are defending Iraq in Syria, because they are fighting there the enemies of Iraq, I tell you all,” he said, “congratulations for having the honor to fight there. Congratulations for making history.”

The group was welcomed into Iraq’s political system a few years ago by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, just as American troops were leaving, and his acceptance of it was regarded as a move that further empowered Iran at the expense of the United States.

Iran has provided the money and training for the group’s Syria recruitment effort, analysts say. In the Shiite-dominated provinces of southern Iraq, posters urge men to go and fight, and there is a phone number to call. The rallying cry for Iraqi Shiites is the defense of the shrine of Sayeda Zeinab, the Shiite holy site in a Damascus suburb. But they often fight alongside the Syrian government, as well as alongside fighters from Iran and Hezbollah, a Shiite militant movement based in Lebanon, against the rebel fighters, who are largely Sunni Muslims.

The group is not only fighting in Syria. It is also back on the streets in Baghdad and in other areas of the country, including Anbar Province, where large sections of territory are in the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Sometimes Asaib Ahl al-Haq’s members fight alongside government forces, and at other times they carry out their own operations, militiamen say. The group was widely blamed for atrocities against Sunnis during the sectarian war of 2005 to 2007; that it is now working hand in hand with the government on the battlefield and vying for votes in the elections is further evidence of Iraq’s rising sectarian tensions.

The group’s remobilization has alarmed Iraq’s Sunnis, who recall its role in sectarian fighting just a few years ago. It also highlights the weaknesses of Iraq’s security forces and has raised alarms that the country is backsliding to the days when it was a patchwork of militias and armed groups controlled the streets.

Salam al-Jazari, an Asaib Ahl al-Haq parliamentary candidate from Baghdad, said: “All Iraqis are calling for security, and we have experiences in this field. We have military experience. Abroad, we have fighters protecting Zeinab, and inside Iraq we have fighters supporting the security forces. We have many operations inside Baghdad capturing terrorists and car bombs, and we even have our men in all the provinces, as our military wing, to impose security.”

In this environment, the group, as it campaigns for seats in Parliament, is not only celebrating its role in the war in Syria but also putting itself forward as the protector of Iraq’s Shiites.

One man at the rally on Friday said that as soon as he returned from Syria his superiors asked him to fight in Anbar.

“I just came back from Syria three days ago,” said Majeed Khadum, 25. “I still have the smell of the war in Syria on me. And my bosses just contacted me yesterday to join them on a mission, but I said no because I am still tired from the war in Syria.”

He said he was attracted to Asaib Ahl al-Haq because “they are protecting the Shiite community inside Iraq and abroad as well.”

As a full display of Iraqi politics, Friday’s event was especially emblematic, with emotional expressions of Shiite empowerment; slogans for unity between Iraq’s three main factions, Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, that felt cynical given the group’s history; and little in the way of actual policy proposals.

And then, at the end, another burst of horrific violence.

A version of this article appears in print on April 26, 2014,

on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline:

Iraqi Militants Stage Political Rally, Then Bombs Go Off.

    Iraqi Militants Stage Political Rally, Then Bombs Go Off, NYT, 25.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/world/middleeast/
    militant-rally-in-iraq-ends-in-deadly-sectarian-bombing.html

In the Middle East, Time to Move On

APRIL 14, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages|Editorial
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The pointless arguing over who brought Israeli-Palestinian peace talks to the brink of collapse is in full swing. The United States is still working to salvage the negotiations, but there is scant sign of serious purpose. It is time for the administration to lay down the principles it believes must undergird a two-state solution, should Israelis and Palestinians ever decide to make peace. Then President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry should move on and devote their attention to other major international challenges like Ukraine.

Among those principles should be: a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with borders based on the 1967 lines; mutually agreed upon land swaps that allow Israel to retain some settlements while compensating the Palestinians with land that is comparable in quantity and quality; and agreement that Jerusalem will be the capital of the two states.

Perhaps the Obama administration’s effort to broker a deal was doomed from the start. In 2009, the administration focused on getting Israel to halt settlement building and ran into the obstinacy of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and resistance from the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, to entering peace talks. Since then, members of Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition government have tried to sabotage the talks. As Tzipi Livni, Israel’s chief negotiator, told the website Ynet, “There are people in the government who don’t want peace.” She cited Naftali Bennett, the leader of the pro-settler party Jewish Home, and Uri Ariel, the housing minister.

Mr. Obama made the right decision to give it a second try last summer, with Mr. Kerry bringing energy and determination to the negotiations. But, after nine months, it is apparent that the two sides are still unwilling to move on the core issues of the borders of a Palestinian state, the future of Jerusalem, the fate of Palestinian refugees and guarantees for Israel’s security. The process broke down last month when Israel failed to release a group of Palestinian prisoners as promised and then announced 700 new housing units for Jewish settlement in a part of Jerusalem that Palestinians claim as the capital of a future state. According to Mr. Kerry that was the “poof” moment when it all fell apart, and the Palestinians responded by applying to join 15 international conventions and treaties. That move won’t get them a state, but it is legal and they did not seek to join the International Criminal Court, a big fear of Israel’s.

In recent days, Israel, which denounced the Palestinians for taking unilateral steps, took its own unilateral steps by announcing plans to deprive the financially strapped Palestinian Authority of about $100 million in monthly tax revenues and retroactively legalizing a 250-acre outpost in the Gush Etzion settlement, which the Israeli newspaper Haaretz said was the largest appropriation of West Bank land in years.

An Israeli-Palestinian peace deal is morally just and essential for the security of both peoples. To achieve one will require determined and courageous leaders and populations on both sides that demand an end to the occupation. Despite the commitment of the United States, there’s very little hope of that now.

A version of this editorial appears in print on April 15, 2014,

on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline:

In the Middle East, Time to Move On.

    In the Middle East, Time to Move On, NYT, 14.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/opinion/in-the-middle-east-time-to-move-on.html

Obama Seeks to Calm Saudis

as Paths Split

MARCH 27, 2014
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — Over seven decades, the United States and Saudi Arabia forged a strategic alliance that became a linchpin of the regional order: a liberal democracy and an ultraconservative monarchy united by shared interests in the stability of the Middle East and the continued flow of oil.

But with President Obama arriving in Riyadh on Friday, the rulers of Saudi Arabia say they feel increasingly compelled to go their own way, pursuing starkly different strategies from Washington in dealing with Iran, Syria, Egypt and the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the region.

“Their view of Mr. Obama is that his entire understanding is wrong,” said Mustafa Alani, an analyst at the Geneva-based Gulf Research Center who is close to the Saudi monarchy. “The trust in him is not very high, so he will not have an easy ride, and a lot of hard questions will be put on the table.”

Saudi Arabia’s leaders had historically favored a quiet, backstage approach to international relations. They preferred to use their oil wealth to buy influence from behind the scenes while allies like Egypt and the United States led the way out front. But the United States has scaled back its military role in the region after the war in Iraq, and since the Arab Spring, Egypt has been consumed by its own internal turmoil.
Photo
A Muslim Brotherhood supporter threw a canister of tear gas in Cairo this week. Credit Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Reuters

Saudi Arabian officials say that has forced them to pursue their own course, to try to contain Iran, oust President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and support the military-backed government that has taken over in Egypt.

For Mr. Obama, the disposition of the Saudis is now a main concern as he plots a policy toward both Syria and Iran. A central goal of his visit is to reassure Saudi Arabia that Washington’s commitment to its security will not be compromised by negotiations with Iran about lifting sanctions in exchange for limits on its nuclear program.

In Egypt, Saudi Arabia has effectively replaced the United States as Cairo’s chief benefactor, in tandem with the United Arab Emirates. That gives the two monarchies enormous influence in Egypt, which was once Washington’s other key Arab ally. And the Saudis have already used that influence to undercut American policy. Riyadh encouraged the military’s ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood from power and the subsequent crackdown on its supporters, while United States diplomats hustled in vain to avert both moves.

Now the Obama administration is hoping to persuade Saudi Arabia to use its greater clout with Cairo to convince the government there to rein in its repression of the opposition and begin to overhaul its economy — the Western formula for restoring stability.

“The Saudis realize that the interim Egyptian government is overshooting the runway with regards to their crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood,” an administration official said on the condition of anonymity to discuss Mr. Obama’s coming visit. “The Saudis realize that the Egyptians have crossed the line with the massive crackdown on journalists, secular opposition, foreign embassy employees, etc.”

But after backing the removal of the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi as president of Egypt, the Saudis have now taken the lead in a campaign against the Brotherhood across the region.

“It is a war,” said a former Saudi official with ties to members of the royal family. “They see the Muslim Brotherhood as an existential threat, and there are some people who think that it is possible to eradicate the Brotherhood throughout the region.”

Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, along with Kuwait, have already given more than $15 billion in aid and loans to Egypt. In recent weeks, a construction company linked to the government of the Emirates announced plans for a partnership with the Egyptian military to build more than $40 billion in new housing in Egypt.

Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, the general who ousted the elected president and is now planning to succeed him, presented the housing project to the Egyptian public on the eve of declaring his intention to seek the presidency. And the Emirates have sent one of their government’s ministers of state, Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, to spend much of his time in Cairo to help the Egyptian government with its economy.

The Saudis have sometimes financed jihadists abroad when in served their interests, in Afghanistan during the 1980s, for example, and in Syria now. But the Saudi royal family, which draws its legitimacy from an ultraconservative Salafi branch of Islam, has long feared the Muslim Brotherhood because of its rival blend of religion and politics and its effectiveness at political organizing. Saudi officials often quote Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, the former long-serving interior minister: “All our problems come from the Muslim Brotherhood,” he once declared, arguing that the group “has destroyed the Arab world.”

But the country’s open support for the military ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood has risks as well. The takeover and crackdown have elicited stirrings of dissent from Saudi clerics sympathetic to the Brotherhood. And around the region, Saudi Arabia is “losing friends left and right,” said Frederic Wehrey, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“The generals are going to have to show that they can govern more effectively than the Brotherhood did, and it is a great worry for the Saudis that the generals might flame out as well,” said Robert W. Jordan, a former United States ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

Saudi journalists say the country’s government-controlled news media has been more protective of Egypt’s new military-backed government than of the royal family. When an Egyptian Army doctor recently announced that the military had discovered a cure for AIDS and hepatitis C, for example, the rest of the Arab world reverberated with ridicule. But Saudi Arabian news outlets all but ignored the fiasco.

In the past month, Saudi Arabia criminalized membership in the Muslim Brotherhood and classified it as a terrorist organization on par with Al Qaeda.

Its Interior Ministry issued a new law imposing harsh penalties on Saudis who join the fighting in Syria for fear that they might return as hardened militants. And to punish neighboring Qatar for its support of the Brotherhood, King Abdullah led the coordinated withdrawal from Qatar of his own ambassador and the envoys from the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt.

At a private gathering of Arab security chiefs at the Four Seasons Hotel in Marrakesh, Morocco, two weeks ago, the Saudi interior minister asked every Arab country to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood, to heated opposition, according to officials from several countries who were briefed on the meeting. Brotherhood-aligned parties are accepted parts of the political establishment in much of the Arab world.

Saudi leaders are already vexed at Mr. Obama for failing to throw America’s military might behind their proxy war with Tehran in Syria, where the Saudis are sending money and weapons to back the Sunni-dominated rebels. And the Saudis were flabbergasted last year when Mr. Obama reversed course at the last minute, calling off missile strikes against the Assad government for its use of chemical weapons.

Mr. Obama opted instead for a deal for Mr. Assad to surrender the weapons, and then watched as the Syrian government rolled back the rebels using conventional force.

Mr. Obama “has got it all wrong when it comes to Iran,” Faisal J. Abbas, a commentator for the Saudi-owned news network Al Arabiya, wrote in a column this week, accusing the president of a “new fondness” for the Iranians and calling it “the heart of the problem” in his relations with the Saudis.

But the Obama administration still hopes for Saudi help with Egypt. “The Saudis also don’t have the intent or inclination to float the Egyptian economy forever,” said the administration official, so it will need to restructure its economy. “The Saudis also get that won’t happen if the current political climate continues.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 28, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Obama’s Goal: Assure Saudis As Paths Split.

    Obama Seeks to Calm Saudis as Paths Split, NYT, 27.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/world/middleeast/
    obama-courts-a-crucial-ally-as-paths-split.html

Amid Crimea Crisis,

Obama Arrives in Europe

for High-Stakes Tour

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR,
ALISON SMALE
and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
The New York Times
MARCH 24, 2014

THE HAGUE — President Obama began a four-day visit to Europe on Monday with a quick tour of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, home to many of the masterworks of Rembrandt and other celebrated Dutch painters, before starting a series of critical consultations with allies about the fast-moving situation in Ukraine.

Mr. Obama’s trip is already being overshadowed by the actions of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The country’s forces seized another Ukrainian military base in Crimea early Monday, as Mr. Obama and other world leaders gathered in the Netherlands. Mr. Obama has called an emergency meeting of the Group of 7 industrial nations that will convene here Monday evening.

“Europe and America are united in our support of the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian people,” Mr. Obama said in a brief statement after touring the museum with Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister.

Mr. Obama made the remarks while standing in front of “The Night Watch,” Rembrandt’s depiction of a group of 17th-century militiamen. Mr. Obama called it “easily the most impressive backdrop I’ve had for a press conference.” After leaving the museum, Mr. Obama headed to The Hague for the start of a summit meeting on nuclear security with 52 other world leaders.
Photo
President Obama is greeted by Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans in Amsterdam on Monday. Credit Pool photo by Peter Dejong

The setting in The Hague of the improvised Group of 7 session and the nuclear security meeting in itself contrasts with the worldview recently offered by Mr. Putin and his power play in Ukraine. The standoff is in stark contrast to the more hopeful tone struck by President Bill Clinton in 1997, when he visited the Netherlands and France to mark progress toward the post-Soviet unification of Europe.

“In the twilight of the 20th century, we look toward a new century with a new Russia and a new NATO, working together in a new Europe of unlimited possibility,” Mr. Clinton said in Paris that year. “The NATO-Russia Founding Act we have just signed joins a great nation and history’s most successful alliance in common cause for a long-sought but never before realized goal — a peaceful, democratic, undivided Europe.”

Now, that vision is a distant memory as President Obama on Monday repeated his intent to keep ratcheting up pressure on Mr. Putin. “We’re united in imposing a cost on Russia for its actions so far,” Mr. Obama said, adding that “the growing sanctions would bring significant consequences to the Russian economy.”

In an earlier briefing in Washington last week, Susan E. Rice, the president’s national security adviser, bluntly acknowledged that the United States is fundamentally reassessing its relationship with Russia. She said the United States wanted to integrate Russia into the world economy but that Mr. Putin’s actions called that policy into question.
Continue reading the main story
Ukraine Crisis in Maps

“What we have seen in Ukraine is obviously a very egregious departure from that,” Ms. Rice told reporters. “And it is causing the countries and people of Europe and the international community and, of course, the United States to reassess what does this mean and what are the implications.”

The Hague, a generally tranquil city of just under half a million inhabitants, numerous canals and ubiquitous bike paths, is home to both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, and over the years has attracted some 160 organizations associated with peace, international justice and security.

The Peace Palace, a neo-Gothic structure that houses the International Court of Justice, was opened with great fanfare in August 1913 by Andrew Carnegie. Just a year later, Europe descended into the hell of World War I, rendering the Palace a symbol of humanity’s greatest hopes and disappointments.

The Netherlands is so proud of its peaceable modern identity that the duty of the government to promote the development of international law is written into the country’s Constitution. The United Nations tribunal on war crimes in the Balkans in the 1990s spurred a new influx of institutions and experts committed to high ideals of international justice.
Photo
Russian troops firing into the air and backed by armored vehicles stormed a Ukrainian airbase in Crimea on Saturday. Credit Dmitry Serebryakov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Residents of the city were not universally delighted by the two-day nuclear security summit meeting this week, however. The 53 heads of state and government in attendance led by Mr. Obama, who brought the usual heavy White House security detail with him — mean that much of the city has been closed off around the summit meeting venue.

Several businesses were asked to close or to have employees work from home. Tens of thousands of police officers and border guards have been deployed in the city, its surroundings and on trains and other transport coming to “the international city of peace and justice,” as The Hague likes to style itself.

Mr. Obama was scheduled to have a meeting with President Xi Jinping of China before participating in the nuclear security sessions to discuss how to secure or destroy dangerous stockpiles of nuclear material that could be used to build bombs if they are stolen by terrorists. The two-day nuclear talks are the third such meeting of world leaders since Mr. Obama took office and a central part of his promise in 2009 to seek a future that is not threatened by nuclear weapons.

Before meeting with Mr. Xi, Mr. Obama told reporters that the two would discuss climate change, the situation in Ukraine and efforts to stop North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. He also said that he planned to raise with Mr. Xi issues that have added to tensions between China and the United States in recent years.

Ukrainian troops were defiant but ultimately capitulated to Russian forces at Belbek Air Force Base in Crimea. At least one man was injured in the confrontation.

Mr. Obama said the two leaders would use the meeting to “work through frictions that exist in our relations around issues like human rights, in dealing with maritime issues in the South China Sea and the Pacific region, in a way that is constructive and hopefully will lead to resolutions.”

He added that he intended to talk about economic issues and trade in the hopes of making sure that “we are both abiding by the rules that allow for us to create jobs and prosperity in both of our countries.”

Speaking with an English translator, Mr. Xi told Mr. Obama that there was “greater space where China and the United States are cooperating” and thanked Mr. Obama for expressing sympathy over the missing Malaysia Airlines jet, which had 154 passengers from China or Taiwan on board, and for American help in the search for the plane He also said that he wants to pursue what he called a “major power relationship” with the United States, something that Mr. Obama had suggested in a recent letter to Mr. Xi.

On Wednesday, Mr. Obama will leave the Netherlands for a daylong summit meeting with European Union leaders in Brussels and to discuss the situation in Russia with the Secretary General of NATO. While in Brussels, Mr. Obama will deliver a speech that aides said would be heavily influenced by Mr. Putin’s recent actions and the threat they pose to Europe.

“It only reinforces the need for the United States to remain committed to a strong trans-Atlantic alliance, to the security of Europe, the integration of Europe,” said Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama. He said the president’s speech would focus on “the values that the United States and Europe stand for together, including both individual liberty, but also the rights of sovereign nations to make their own decisions and to have their sovereignty and territorial integrity respected.”

Mr. Obama will fly to Rome on Thursday for a meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican. Aides said the president was eager to discuss the pope’s “commitment to address issues like income inequality,” a subject that Mr. Obama has sought to highlight as an election-year issue at home. But veteran observers of the Vatican said the pope might use the opportunity to discuss other issues as well, including abortion, religious liberty and contraception.

The final scheduled stop on Mr. Obama’s trip is a visit to Saudi Arabia.

Michael D. Shear and Alison Smale reported from The Hague,

and David M. Herszenhorn from Simferopol, Crimea.

Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Berlin.

    Amid Crimea Crisis, Obama Arrives in Europe for High-Stakes Tour,
    NYT, 24.3.2014
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/world/europe/obama-russia-crimea.html

3 Presidents and a Riddle Named Putin

MARCH 23, 2014
The New York Times
Europe|News Analysis
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — Bill Clinton found him to be cold and worrisome, but predicted he would be a tough and able leader. George W. Bush wanted to make him a friend and partner in the war on terror, but grew disillusioned over time.

Barack Obama tried working around him by building up his protégé in the Kremlin, an approach that worked for a time but steadily deteriorated to the point that relations between Russia and the United States are now at their worst point since the end of the Cold War.

For 15 years, Vladimir V. Putin has confounded American presidents as they tried to figure him out, only to misjudge him time and again. He has defied their assumptions and rebuffed their efforts at friendship. He has argued with them, lectured them, misled them, accused them, kept them waiting, kept them guessing, betrayed them and felt betrayed by them.

Each of the three presidents tried in his own way to forge a historic if elusive new relationship with Russia, only to find their efforts torpedoed by the wiry martial arts master and former K.G.B. colonel. They imagined him to be something he was not or assumed they could manage a man who refuses to be managed. They saw him through their own lens, believing he viewed Russia’s interests as they thought he should. And they underestimated his deep sense of grievance.

To the extent that there were any illusions left in Washington, and it is hard to imagine there were by this point, they were finally and irrevocably shattered by Mr. Putin’s takeover of Crimea and the exchange of sanctions that has followed. As Russian forces now mass on the Ukrainian border, the debate has now shifted from how to work with Mr. Putin to how to counter him.

“He’s declared himself,” said Tom Donilon, President Obama’s former national security adviser. “That’s who you have to deal with. Trying to wish it away is not a policy.”

Looking back now, aides to all three presidents offer roughly similar takes: Their man was hardly naïve about Mr. Putin and saw him for what he was, but felt there was little choice other than to try to establish a better relationship. It may be that some of their policies hurt the chances of that by fueling Mr. Putin’s discontent, whether it was NATO expansion, the Iraq war or the Libya war, but in the end, they said, they were dealing with a Russian leader fundamentally at odds with the West.

“I know there’s been some criticism on, was the reset ill advised?” said Mr. Donilon, using the Obama administration’s term for its policy. “No, the reset wasn’t ill advised. The reset resulted in direct accomplishments that were in the interests of the United States.”

Some specialists said Mr. Obama and his two predecessors saw what they wanted to see. “The West has focused on the notion that Putin is a pragmatic realist who will cooperate with us whenever there are sufficient common interests,” said James M. Goldgeier, dean of international studies at American University. “We let that belief overshadow his stated goal of revising a post-Cold War settlement in which Moscow lost control over significant territory and watched as the West expanded its domain.”

Presidents tend to think of autocrats like Mr. Putin as fellow statesmen, said Dennis Blair, Mr. Obama’s first director of national intelligence. “They should think of dictators like they think of domestic politicians of the other party,” he said, “opponents who smile on occasion when it suits their purposes, and cooperate when it is to their advantage, but who are at heart trying to push the U.S. out of power, will kneecap the United States if they get the chance and will only go along if the U.S. has more power than they.”

Eric S. Edelman, who was undersecretary of defense under Mr. Bush, said American leaders overestimated their ability to assuage Mr. Putin’s anger about the West. “There has been a persistent tendency on the part of U.S. presidents and Western leaders more broadly to see the sense of grievance as a background condition that could be modulated by consideration of Russian national interests,” he said. “In fact, those efforts have been invariably taken as weakness.”

After 15 years, no one in Washington still thinks of Mr. Putin as a partner. “He goes to bed at night thinking of Peter the Great and he wakes up thinking of Stalin,” Representative Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said on “Meet the Press” on NBC on Sunday. “We need to understand who he is and what he wants. It may not fit with what we believe of the 21st century.”

 

Bush’s Disillusionment

Mr. Clinton was the first president to encounter Mr. Putin, although they did not overlap for long. He had spent much of his presidency building a strong relationship with President Boris N. Yeltsin, Mr. Putin’s predecessor, and gave the benefit of the doubt to the handpicked successor who became Russia’s prime minister in 1999 and president on New Year’s Eve.

“I came away from the meeting believing Yeltsin had picked a successor who had the skills and capacity for hard work necessary to manage Russia’s turbulent political and economic life better than Yeltsin now could, given his health problems,” Mr. Clinton wrote in his memoir. When Mr. Putin’s selection was ratified in a March 2000 election, Mr. Clinton called to congratulate him and, as he later wrote, “hung up the phone thinking he was tough enough to hold Russia together.”

Mr. Clinton had his worries, though, particularly as Mr. Putin waged a brutal war in the separatist republic of Chechnya and cracked down on independent media. He privately urged Mr. Yeltsin to watch over his successor. Mr. Clinton also felt brushed off by Mr. Putin, who seemed uninterested in doing business with a departing American president.

But the prevailing attitude at the time was that Mr. Putin was a modernizer who could consolidate the raw form of democracy and capitalism that Mr. Yeltsin had introduced to Russia. He moved early to overhaul the country’s tax, land and judicial codes. As Strobe Talbott, Mr. Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, put it in his book on that period, George F. Kennan, the noted Kremlinologist, thought that Mr. Putin “was young enough, adroit enough and realistic enough to understand that Russia’s ongoing transition required that he not just co-opt the power structure, but to transform it.”

Mr. Bush came to office skeptical of Mr. Putin, privately calling him “one cold dude,” but bonded with him during their first meeting in Slovenia in June 2001, after which he made his now-famous comment about looking into the Russian’s soul. Mr. Putin had made a connection with the religious Mr. Bush by telling him a story about a cross that his mother had given him and how it was the only thing that survived a fire at his country house.

Not everyone was convinced. Mr. Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, privately told people at the time that when he saw Mr. Putin, “I think K.G.B., K.G.B., K.G.B.” But Mr. Bush was determined to erase the historical divide and courted Mr. Putin during the Russian leader’s visits to Camp David and Mr. Bush’s Texas ranch.

Mr. Putin liked to brag that he was the first foreign leader to call Mr. Bush after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and he permitted American troops into Central Asia as a base of operations against Afghanistan.

But Mr. Putin never felt Mr. Bush delivered in return and the relationship strained over the Iraq War and the Kremlin’s accelerating crackdown on dissent at home. By Mr. Bush’s second term, the two were quarreling over Russian democracy, reaching a peak during a testy meeting in Slovakia in 2005.

“It was like junior high debating,” Mr. Bush complained later to Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair, according to notes of the conversation. Mr. Putin kept throwing Mr. Bush’s arguments back at him. “I sat there for an hour and 45 minutes and it went on and on,” Mr. Bush said. “At one point, the interpreter made me so mad that I nearly reached over the table and slapped the hell out of the guy. He had a mocking tone, making accusations about America.”

He was even more frustrated by Mr. Putin a year later. “He’s not well-informed,” Bush told the visiting prime minister of Denmark in 2006. “It’s like arguing with an eighth-grader with his facts wrong.”

He told another visiting leader a few weeks later that he was losing hope of bringing Mr. Putin around. “I think Putin is not a democrat anymore,” he said. “He’s a czar. I think we’ve lost him.”

 

‘A Stone-Cold Killer’

But Mr. Bush was reluctant to give up, even if those around him no longer saw the opportunity he saw. His new defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, came back from his first meeting with Mr. Putin and told colleagues that unlike Mr. Bush, he had “looked into Putin’s eyes and, just as I expected, had seen a stone-cold killer.”

In the spring of 2008, Mr. Bush put Ukraine and Georgia on the road to NATO membership, which divided the alliance and infuriated Mr. Putin. By August of that year, the two leaders were in Beijing for the Summer Olympics when word arrived that Russian troops were marching into Georgia.

Mr. Bush in his memoir recalled confronting Mr. Putin, scolding him for being provoked by Mikheil Saakashvili, then Georgia’s anti-Moscow president.

“I’ve been warning you Saakashvili is hot-blooded,” Mr. Bush told Mr. Putin.

“I’m hot-blooded too,” Mr. Putin said.

“No, Vladimir,” Mr. Bush responded. “You’re coldblooded.”

i will assume putin was a competent KGB agent...isn't it interesting that he made a move on crimea when he knows the U.S. is tired of war......

Worried that Crimea might be next, Mr. Bush succeeded in stopping Russia from swallowing up Georgia altogether. But on the eve of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the global financial meltdown, he did not impose the sort of sanctions that Mr. Obama is now applying.

“We and the Europeans threw the relationship into the toilet at the end of 2008,” Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, recalled last week. “We wanted to send the message that strategically this was not acceptable. Now in retrospect, we probably should have done more like economic sanctions.”

If Mr. Bush did not take the strongest punitive actions possible, his successor soon made the point moot. Taking office just months later, Mr. Obama decided to end any isolation of Russia because of Georgia in favor of rebuilding relations. Unlike his predecessors, he would try to forge a relationship not by befriending Mr. Putin but by bypassing him.

Ostensibly complying with Russia’s two-term constitutional limit, Mr. Putin had stepped down as president and installed his aide, Dmitri A. Medvedev, in his place, while taking over as prime minister himself. So Mr. Obama decided to treat Mr. Medvedev as if he really were the leader.

A diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks later captured the strategy in summing up similar French priorities: “Cultivating relations with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, in the hope that he can become a leader independent of Vladimir Putin.”

Before his first trip to Moscow, Mr. Obama publicly dismissed Mr. Putin as having “one foot in the old ways of doing business” and pumped up Mr. Medvedev as a new-generation leader. Mr. Obama’s inaugural meeting with Mr. Putin a few days later featured a classic tirade by the Russian about all the ways that the United States had mistreated Moscow.

Among those skeptical of Mr. Obama’s strategy were Mr. Gates, who stayed on as defense secretary, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the new secretary of state. Like Mr. Gates, Mrs. Clinton was deeply suspicious of Mr. Putin. In private, she mockingly imitated his man’s-man, legs-spread-wide posture during their meetings. But even if they did not assign it much chance of success, she and Mr. Gates both agreed the policy was worth trying and she gamely presented her Russian counterpart with a “reset” button, remembered largely for its mistaken Russian translation.

Obama’s ‘Reset’ Gambit

For a time, Mr. Obama’s gamble on Mr. Medvedev seemed to be working. They revived Mr. Bush’s civilian nuclear agreement, signed a nuclear arms treaty, sealed an agreement allowing American troops to fly through Russian airspace en route to Afghanistan and collaborated on sanctions against Iran. But Mr. Putin was not to be ignored and by 2012 returned to the presidency, sidelining Mr. Medvedev and making clear that he would not let Mr. Obama roll over him.

Mr. Putin ignored Mr. Obama’s efforts to start new nuclear arms talks and gave asylum to Edward J. Snowden, the national security leaker. Mr. Obama canceled a trip to Moscow, making clear that he had no personal connection with Mr. Putin. The Russian leader has a “kind of slouch” that made him look “like that bored schoolboy in the back of the classroom,” Mr. Obama noted.

In the end, Mr. Obama did not see how the pro-Western revolution in Ukraine that toppled a Moscow ally last month would look through Mr. Putin’s eyes, said several Russia specialists. “With no meaningful rapport or trust between Obama and Putin, it’s nearly impossible to use high-level phone calls for actual problem solving,” said Andrew Weiss, a former Russia adviser to Mr. Clinton and now a vice president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Instead, it looks like we’re mostly posturing and talking past each other.”

As Mr. Obama has tried to figure out what to do to end the crisis over Ukraine, he has reached out to other leaders who still have a relationship with Mr. Putin, including Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. She privately told Mr. Obama that after speaking with Mr. Putin she thought he was “in another world.” Secretary of State John Kerry later said publicly that Mr. Putin’s speech on Crimea did not “jibe with reality.”

That has sparked a debate in Washington: Has Mr. Putin changed over the last 15 years and become unhinged in some way, or does he simply see the world in starkly different terms than the West does, terms that make it hard if not impossible to find common ground?

“He’s not delusional, but he’s inhabiting a Russia of the past — a version of the past that he has created,” said Fiona Hill, the top intelligence officer on Russia during Mr. Bush’s presidency and co-author of “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.” “His present is defined by it and there is no coherent vision of the future. Where exactly does he go from here beyond reasserting and regaining influence over territories and people? Then what?”

That is the question this president, and likely the next one, will be asking for some time to come.

A version of this news analysis appears in print

on March 24, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition

with the headline: 3 Presidents and a Riddle Named Putin.

    3 Presidents and a Riddle Named Putin, NYT, 23.3.2014
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/24/world/europe/
    3-presidents-and-a-riddle-named-putin.html

Obama Steps Up Russia Sanctions

in Ukraine Crisis

MARCH 20, 2014
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER, ANNIE LOWREY
and STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON — President Obama expanded sanctions against Russia on Thursday, blacklisting a bank and several wealthy businessmen with close ties to President Vladimir V. Putin, as the United States struggled to forestall further Russian incursions into Ukraine.

Among those targeted were Sergei B. Ivanov, the president’s chief of staff; Gennady N. Timchenko, a billionaire investor with links to Mr. Putin; and Yuri V. Kovalchuk, whom the administration described as the personal banker for Russian leaders, including the president.

Mr. Obama also opened the door to more sweeping measures against core parts of the Russian economy, including the oil and natural gas industries, which account for much of Russia’s exports. He said the actions could disrupt the global economy, but might be necessary because of what he described as menacing movements by the Russian military near eastern and southern Ukraine.

Administration officials insisted that the new sanctions would have more bite than the initial ones Mr. Obama announced on Monday. But it remains unclear whether they will be enough to put a brake on Mr. Putin, who brushed aside the previous measures and moved swiftly to annex Crimea.

Responding almost immediately, Russia barred nine prominent American officials from entering the country, including the speaker of the House, John A. Boehner; the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada; Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona; and three close advisers to Mr. Obama.

Mr. Obama, speaking from the South Lawn of the White House, said Russia’s aggressive moves toward Ukraine had only escalated since the referendum in Crimea on Sunday.

“These are all choices that the Russian government has made,” he said, “and because of these choices, the United States is today moving, as we said we would, to impose additional costs on Russia.”

The hastily arranged statement, delivered with the presidential helicopter idling behind Mr. Obama before he left for a speech on the economy and a Democratic Party fund-raising event in Florida, underscored how the White House has raced to keep up with the rush of events in Ukraine.

On Monday, Mr. Obama announced measures against a number of Russian officials while saying he would calibrate the pressure campaign to respond to Mr. Putin’s actions. But a senior administration official said it became clear within 24 hours, with Mr. Putin’s defiant speech to the Russian Parliament and dismissive statements by members of his government, that the United States would have to do more.

“They were exulting in their nationalistic way,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the administration’s internal deliberations. “So we moved from officials to cronies. These are Putin’s money people.”

The administration was also prodded by signs that the Russian military had moved troops into positions that could threaten southern and eastern Ukraine. While Mr. Obama has ruled out direct military involvement, another senior administration official told reporters that the Pentagon was studying whether to provide communications equipment and other nonlethal assistance to the Ukrainian military.

The latest round of sanctions is surgical, experts said: designed to hit the wallets of individuals with close ties to Mr. Putin, rather than to damage the broader Russian economy.

“The dollar figure is not big,” said Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “But these people are really close to Putin.”

If Europe were to join the United States in targeting Russian individuals, and if Washington were to go after Russia’s energy sector, “That would have a real economic effect,” he said.

The list announced by the Treasury Department included 16 senior Russian government officials and heads of state enterprises, some of whom have longstanding ties to Mr. Putin. Several of these people had already been sanctioned by the European Union.

New to the list were four men who have amassed vast empires through their ties to the government. In addition to Mr. Timchenko and Mr. Kovalchuk, they are Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, billionaire brothers who were awarded an estimated $7 billion in contracts for the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.

The Treasury also designated Bank Rossiya, the 17th-largest Russian bank, of which Mr. Kovalchuk is the largest shareholder. A senior official said that would pinch Mr. Putin and his friends because Rossiya would no longer be able to conduct transactions in dollars and would find its assets frozen in correspondent accounts in European banks.

At least for now, though, a senior American official said he did not expect the European Union to target Russian business executives because it would require additional legal criteria. During Vice President Joseph R. Biden’s trip to Poland and the Baltic states this week, he encountered little desire for broader sanctions against Russia, even in countries with a long history of being subjugated by their Russian neighbor.

Mr. Obama said more sweeping sanctions were not his “preferred outcome,” and analysts said they did not expect him to impose them. Under a new executive order, he could target Russian industrial sectors, including energy, engineering, metals and mining, and financial services.

“Russia must know that further escalation will only isolate it further from the international community,” he said.

The economic calculus favors Washington, analysts said: Even significantly tougher sanctions — the kind applied to countries like Iran — would probably have only a muted effect on the American economy because of the modest size of the Russian economy and its limited trade ties with the United States.

A senior Treasury official said there were already signs that the sanctions were having an impact. On Thursday, Standard & Poor’s, the ratings agency, downgraded its outlook on the Russian economy to negative. And jitters over Crimea have weakened the Russian stock market and the value of the ruble.

One of Mr. Timchenko’s companies, Gunvor Group, a commodities trader, also announced that he had sold his substantial stake in the company on Wednesday to the chief executive, Torbjorn Tornqvist, a Swede, “to ensure with certainty the continued and uninterrupted operations.” Mr. Timchenko and Mr. Tornqvist founded Gunvor in 2000.

In Russia, officials reacted to the sanctions with a mix of indignation and contempt. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said: “They are illegitimate. They have no international legal grounds under them.”

Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, denounced them as unacceptable and said Russia’s response “will be based on the principle of reciprocity and will not take long.” He suggested that one of those targeted, Sergei B. Ivanov, who spent over 20 years in the K.G.B.’s foreign intelligence service and is a close friend of Mr. Putin’s, was already barred by “a majority of countries in the West.”

Another person on the list, Vladimir I. Yakunin, the head of the Russian Railways and a close friend of Mr. Putin’s, said he was being punished for political reasons. “I’m sorry that a country that calls itself democratic uses sanctions for an honest position and for honest statements,” he told the Interfax news agency.

Until now, at least, the prospect of sanctions had done nothing to slow Russia’s speedy absorption of Crimea.

On Thursday, the lower house of the Russian Parliament ratified treaties making Crimea and, separately, the city of Sevastopol, parts of the Russian Federation.

During the debate, many lawmakers wore brown and orange czarist-era ribbons symbolizing military valor.

Mark Landler and Annie Lowrey reported from Washington,

and Steven Lee Myers from Moscow.

A version of this article appears in print on March 21, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Obama Steps Up Russia Sanctions in Ukraine Crisis.

    Obama Steps Up Russia Sanctions in Ukraine Crisis, NYT, 20.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/21/us/politics/
    us-expanding-sanctions-against-russia-over-ukraine.html
 

Europe

Putin Recognizes Crimea Secession,

Defying the West

 

MARCH 17, 2014
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
and PETER BAKER

MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia signed a decree on Monday formally recognizing Crimea as a “sovereign and independent state,” laying the groundwork for annexation and defying the United States and Europe just hours after they imposed their first financial sanctions against Moscow since the crisis in Ukraine began.

Mr. Putin issued his late-night decree after the region declared independence earlier in the day and asked Russia to annex it in keeping with the results of a referendum conducted Sunday under the watch of Russian troops. The Kremlin announced that Mr. Putin would address both houses of the Russian Parliament on Tuesday, when many expect him to endorse annexation.
 

The moves indicated that Moscow remained undaunted by Western pressure in a clash of wills that has created the most profound rift in East-West relations since the end of the Cold War, and that threatens the redrawn borders established by the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Every time the United States and Europe have tried to draw a line in recent weeks, Mr. Putin has vaulted past it. The White House indicated that it had held back going after some in Mr. Putin’s inner circle to have room for its next countermove.

The decree signed on Monday effectively raised the ante on President Obama after he froze assets and banned travel for 11 Russian and Ukrainian figures, including Vladislav Surkov, a longtime adviser to Mr. Putin; Dmitri O. Rogozin, a deputy prime minister of Russia; and Valentina I. Matviyenko, a Putin ally and the chairwoman of the Federation Council, the upper house of Russia’s Parliament. The European Union followed with sanctions against 21 Russian and Ukrainian figures.

The sweep of the sanctions was viewed as relatively modest, but Mr. Obama signaled he may go further by signing an executive order authorizing future action against Russia’s arms industry and the wealthy business figures who support Mr. Putin’s governing clique.

“We’re making it clear that there are consequences for their actions,” Mr. Obama said as he announced the sanctions. “We’ll continue to make clear to Russia that further provocations will achieve nothing except to further isolate Russia and diminish its place in the world.”

In Simferopol, the Crimean capital, celebrations continued Monday, and officials declared it a day off from work as officials announced that 97 percent of voters in Sunday’s referendum supported rejoining Russia. Legislators moved to complete the break from Ukraine, adopting a resolution declaring that the laws of Ukraine no longer applied to Crimea and that state funds and property in Crimea had been transferred to their new entity.

Highlighting the tensions, the Ukrainian Parliament in Kiev approved a presidential decree authorizing the call-up of 20,000 reservists, and another 20,000 for a newly formed national guard. The interim government also increased the military budget with an emergency allotment of about $680 million.

Moscow moved to welcome back Crimea, which was part of Russia for much of the past few centuries, until the Kremlin transferred it to control of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1954; it remained under Ukraine when that became a separate country in 1991. Every faction in the Russian Duma submitted draft legislation on Monday officially reversing that 60-year-old decision.

The consensus in Moscow was so strong that even the last Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, whose role in the dissolution of the Soviet Union is deeply reviled in Russia, endorsed Crimea’s move, telling the Interfax news agency that its independence “should be welcomed and not met with the announcement of sanctions.”

He added, “If until now Crimea had been joined to Ukraine because of Soviet laws that were taken without asking the people, then now the people have decided to rectify this error.”
 

The American sanctions targeted prominent Russian officials, but not those likely to have many overseas assets; the European list went after generally lower-level targets. As a result, the actions were met with derision and even mockery in Moscow. In one measure of the reaction, Russia’s battered stock markets rose sharply at the end of the day.

“This is a big honor for me,” said Mr. Surkov, once called the “gray cardinal” of the Kremlin and known as the architect of Mr. Putin’s highly centralized political system. He told a Russian newspaper that he had no assets abroad: “In the U.S., I’m interested in Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg and Jackson Pollock. I don’t need a visa to access their work.”

Mr. Rogozin, who oversees the defense industry, chided “Comrade Obama” in a Twitter message noting that those on the list did not have assets abroad. Andrey Klishas, a member of the Federation Council, told Interfax that the measures against him “were no tragedy for me.” Yelena Mizulina, a member of the Duma, said in an email statement that she considered the sanctions “a rude violation of my rights and freedoms as a citizen and a politician.”

Others singled out by the United States on Monday were Sergei Glazyev, an economist who has been advising Mr. Putin on Ukraine, and Leonid Slutsky, another Duma member. Mr. Obama did not go after Mr. Putin or others in his inner circle.
 

The United States issued sanctions against two Russian-supported figures who have taken power in Crimea: Sergei Aksyonov, the newly declared prime minister, and Vladimir Konstantinov, the speaker of its Parliament.

It also penalized Viktor F. Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president and Moscow ally whose ouster amid pro-Western street protests last month led to the Russian invasion of Crimea, and Viktor Medvedchuk, the leader of a pro-Russia civil society group, Ukrainian Choice.

The European list for sanctions included Mr. Aksyonov, Mr. Konstantinov, Mr. Klishas and Mr. Slutsky. Over all, the Europeans targeted 10 Russian politicians, seven pro-Russian Crimeans, three Russian military officers in Crimea and the former leader of Ukraine’s Black Sea Fleet, who defected to Russia this month. But the Europeans declined to go after elite figures like Mr. Surkov and Mr. Rogozin out of reluctance to poke Mr. Putin too directly.
Continue reading the main story

He noted that “Europe is closer and will therefore pay a bigger cost for sanctions against Russia.” He also pointed to Europe’s collective decision-making process.

“In the United States, one man takes a decision on the basis of an executive order,” Mr. Sikorski said, “whereas in Europe, for these measures to be legal, we need a consensus of 28 member states.”

Diplomats said some European countries wanted to include as a sanctions target Dmitry K. Kiselyov, a Russian television anchor who warned during a broadcast of his country’s ability to “turn America into radioactive dust.” But his name was dropped amid objections from Finland and others that journalists should not be singled out, even those in state-controlled organizations.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said the sanctions were not imposed lightly. “We wanted talks and a diplomatic solution, but the clear violation of international law yesterday with the so-called referendum meant we had to take this step, and I am glad that Europe showed such unity,” she said.

American officials made clear they will ratchet up the pressure if Mr. Putin does not back down. They went immediately back to the Situation Room after the announcement to begin work on a next round of sanctions that could come as early as this week. Mr. Obama’s new executive order expanded the scope of his authority to target three groups: Russian government officials, the Russian arms industry and Russians who work on behalf of government officials, the latter called “Russian government cronies” by a senior American official.

While targeting a limited number of individuals at first, administration officials said the scope of the new order was broader than any aimed at Moscow in decades. “These are by far the most comprehensive sanctions applied to Russia since the end of the Cold War — far and away so,” said another senior official, who under the ground rules set by the administration was not identified.

The bravado in Moscow struck some American officials as bluster masking real concern about the potential financial bite of future sanctions, and there is some evidence that Russians are anxiously pulling tens of billions of dollars out of American accounts. Nearly $105 billion was shifted out of Treasury custodial accounts by foreign central banks or other institutions in the week that ended last Wednesday, more than three times that of any other recent week.

Mr. Obama held out hope that diplomacy may yet succeed, but he sent Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to Eastern Europe to meet with nervous NATO allies like Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and reassure them of American resolve.

Steven Lee Myers reported from Moscow,

and Peter Baker from Washington.

Reporting was contributed by David M. Herszenhorn

from Simferopol, Ukraine;

Andrew Higgins from Brussels; Alan Cowell from London;

Andrew E. Kramer from Kiev, Ukraine;

and Alison Smale from Berlin.

A version of this article appears in print on March 18, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Putin Recognizes Crimea Secession, Defying the West.

    Putin Recognizes Crimea Secession, Defying the West, NYT, 18.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/world/europe/
    us-imposes-new-sanctions-on-russian-officials.html

Obama Has Made America Look Weak

John McCain on Responding to Russia’s Aggression

MARCH 14, 2014
By JOHN MCCAIN
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages|Op-Ed Contributor

Should Russia’s invasion and looming annexation of Crimea be blamed on President Barack Obama? Of course not, just as it should not be blamed on NATO expansion, the Iraq war or Western interventions to stop mass atrocities in the Balkans and Libya. The blame lies squarely with Vladimir V. Putin, an unreconstructed Russian imperialist and K.G.B. apparatchik.

But in a broader sense, Crimea has exposed the disturbing lack of realism that has characterized our foreign policy under President Obama. It is this worldview, or lack of one, that must change.

For five years, Americans have been told that “the tide of war is receding,” that we can pull back from the world at little cost to our interests and values. This has fed a perception that the United States is weak, and to people like Mr. Putin, weakness is provocative.

That is how Mr. Putin viewed the “reset” policy. United States missile defense plans were scaled back. Allies in Eastern Europe and Georgia were undercut. NATO enlargement was tabled. A new strategic arms reduction treaty required significant cuts by America, but not Russia. Mr. Putin gave little. Mr. Obama promised “more flexibility.”

Mr. Putin also saw a lack of resolve in President Obama’s actions beyond Europe. In Afghanistan and Iraq, military decisions have appeared driven more by a desire to withdraw than to succeed. Defense budgets have been slashed based on hope, not strategy. Iran and China have bullied America’s allies at no discernible cost. Perhaps worst of all, Bashar al-Assad crossed President Obama’s “red line” by using chemical weapons in Syria, and nothing happened to him.

For Mr. Putin, vacillation invites aggression. His world is a brutish, cynical place, where power is worshiped, weakness is despised, and all rivalries are zero-sum. He sees the fall of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” He does not accept that Russia’s neighbors, least of all Ukraine, are independent countries. To him, they are Russia’s “near abroad” and must be brought back under Moscow’s dominion by any means necessary.

What is most troubling about Mr. Putin’s aggression in Crimea is that it reflects a growing disregard for America’s credibility in the world. That has emboldened other aggressive actors — from Chinese nationalists to Al Qaeda terrorists and Iranian theocrats.

Crimea must be the place where President Obama recognizes this reality and begins to restore the credibility of the United States as a world leader. This will require two different kinds of responses.

The first, and most urgent, is crisis management. We need to work with our allies to shore up Ukraine, reassure shaken friends in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States, show Mr. Putin a strong, united front, and prevent the crisis from getting worse.

This does not mean military action against Russia. But it should mean sanctioning Russian officials, isolating Russia internationally, and increasing NATO’s military presence and exercises on its eastern frontier. It should mean boycotting the Group of 8 summit meeting in Sochi and convening the Group of 7 elsewhere. It should also mean making every effort to support and resupply Ukrainian patriots, both soldiers and civilians, who are standing their ground in government facilities across Crimea. They refuse to accept the dismemberment of their country. So should we.

Crimea may be falling under Russian control, but Ukraine has another chance for freedom, rule of law and a European future. To seize that opportunity, Ukrainian leaders must unify the nation and commit to reform, and the West must provide significant financial and other assistance. Bipartisan legislation now before Congress would contribute to this effort.

More broadly, we must rearm ourselves morally and intellectually to prevent the darkness of Mr. Putin’s world from befalling more of humanity. We may wish to believe, as President Obama has said, that we are not “in competition with Russia.” But Mr. Putin believes Russia is in competition with us, and pretending otherwise is an unrealistic basis for a great nation’s foreign policy.

Three American presidents have sought to cooperate with Mr. Putin where our interests converge. What should be clear now, and should have been clear the last time he tore apart a country, is that our interests do not converge much. He will always insist on being our rival.

The United States must look beyond Mr. Putin. His regime may appear imposing, but it is rotting inside. His Russia is not a great power on par with America. It is a gas station run by a corrupt, autocratic regime. And eventually, Russians will come for Mr. Putin in the same way and for the same reasons that Ukrainians came for Viktor F. Yanukovych.

We must prepare for that day now. We should show the Russian people that we support their human rights by expanding the Magnitsky Act to impose more sanctions on those who abuse them. We should stop allowing their country’s most corrupt officials to park ill-gotten proceeds in Western economies. We should prove that countries like Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova have a future in the Euro-Atlantic community, and Russia can, too.

We must do all we can to demonstrate that the tide of history is with Ukraine — that the political values of the West, and not those of an imperial kleptocracy, are the hope of all nations. If Ukraine can emerge from this crisis independent, prosperous and anchored firmly in Europe, how long before Russians begin to ask, “Why not us?” That would not just spell the end of Mr. Putin’s imperial dreams; it would strip away the lies that sustain his rule over Russia itself.

America’s greatest strength has always been its hopeful vision of human progress. But hopes do not advance themselves, and the darkness that threatens them will not be checked by an America in denial about the world as it is. It requires realism, strength and leadership. If Crimea does not awaken us to this fact, I am afraid to think what will.

John McCain is a Republican senator from Arizona.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 15, 2014,

on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline:

Obama Made America Look Weak.

    Obama Has Made America Look Weak, NYT, 14.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/15/opinion/mccain-a-return-to-us-realism.html

Obama Makes Diplomatic Push

to Defuse Crisis in Ukraine

 

MARCH 12, 2014
The new York Times
By PETER BAKER
and MICHAEL R. GORDON

WASHINGTON — President Obama and Ukraine’s interim prime minister opened the door on Wednesday to a political solution that could lead to more autonomy for Crimea if Russian troops withdraw, as the United States embarked on a last-ditch diplomatic effort to defuse a crisis that reignited tensions between East and West.

The tentative feeler came as Mr. Obama dispatched Secretary of State John Kerry to London to meet with his Russian counterpart on Friday, two days before a Russian-supported referendum in Crimea on whether to secede from Ukraine. Mr. Obama said the world would “completely reject” what he called a “slapdash election,” but added he still hoped for a peaceful settlement.

In a show of solidarity for the besieged Ukraine, Mr. Obama hosted a White House visit by Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk, the country’s pro-Western acting prime minister, and vowed to “stand with Ukraine.” But he also hinted at a formulation that could be the basis for the coming talks between Mr. Kerry and Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, recognizing Moscow’s interest in helping the Russian-speaking population in Crimea while affirming that it is part of Ukraine.

Mr. Obama said Mr. Yatsenyuk told him that a new Ukrainian government formed after elections scheduled for May 25 could find ways to address Crimea’s concerns. “There is a constitutional process in place and a set of elections that they can move forward on that, in fact, could lead to different arrangements over time with the Crimean region,” Mr. Obama said. “But that is not something that can be done with the barrel of a gun pointed at you.”

At a separate appearance later in the day, Mr. Yatsenyuk expressed willingness to consider concessions to Crimea. “We the Ukrainian government are ready to start a nationwide dialogue how to increase the rights of autonomous Republic of Crimea, starting with taxes and ending with other aspects like language issues,” he told an audience at the Atlantic Council.

Any such discussion, he added, had to take place in a “constitutional manner” rather than imposed by Russian troops. But he did not rule out holding a local referendum if authorized by the Ukrainian Parliament. “Only afterward, this referendum could be a constitutional one,” he said.

Although Mr. Yatsenyuk has articulated similar sentiments before, bringing the idea directly to Washington could frame the final diplomatic discussions before the Sunday vote. He also tried to reassure Moscow by saying that he respects the longstanding agreement permitting a Russian naval base in Crimea, and that Ukraine would not cut off water, electricity or other supplies to the peninsula.

But he used his visit to Washington to make clear that despite his preference for talks, his government would not accept partition of the country. “Mr. President,” he told Mr. Obama in the Oval Office, “it’s all about the freedom. We fight for our freedom. We fight for our independence. We fight for our sovereignty. And we will never surrender.”

Mr. Kerry employed similarly tough language during testimony Wednesday on Capitol Hill, where he said the United States and its partners were prepared to impose tough sanctions if Russia moved to annex Crimea. “It can get ugly fast if the wrong choices are made, and it can get ugly in multiple directions,” he said. “Our hope is that there is a way to have a reasonable outcome here.”

In fact, he suggested the two sides could continue talking even if Sunday’s referendum is held, as long as Russia stops short of annexation. “There are a lot of variants here, which is why it is urgent that we have this conversation with the Russians,” he said. The United States has “exchanged some thoughts” with Moscow on how to address the crisis, he said, but the two sides “haven’t had a meeting of the minds.”

For Mr. Yatsenyuk, the visit to Washington was not just about rallying support against Russia but was also an effort to seek an economic booster shot for his vulnerable economy. Yet even as both American political parties celebrated Mr. Yatsenyuk as a hero and promised to help Ukraine, a bid to provide financial assistance bogged down in a polarized Congress.

The Republican-led House has passed legislation authorizing $1 billion in loan guarantees, but the Democratic-led Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday passed, in a 14-to-3 vote, an alternative version that attached long-stalled reforms to the International Monetary Fund sought by the Obama administration. The administration and its allies contend that the I.M.F. changes would raise loan limits for countries like Ukraine, while House Republicans maintain they would weaken American influence at the organization and expose taxpayers to more risk.

The Treasury Department has lobbied Congress to approve the reforms since they were negotiated in 2010, and this moment might be its best chance to finally pass them. With Ukraine in financial free-fall, the department has redoubled its efforts, arguing that the country’s standing in the I.M.F., and the fund’s standing in the world, are at stake.

“We’re already hearing calls by some to say if the United States doesn’t approve them, we should maybe move on without them,” Jacob J. Lew, the Treasury secretary, told a Senate committee on Wednesday. “That’s not a good place for the United States to be.”

Some Senate Republicans and other party figures sided with the Obama administration. A group of officials from President George W. Bush’s administration sent a letter of support on Wednesday signed by Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state; Paul H. O’Neill and John W. Snow, the former treasury secretaries; Tom Ridge, the former homeland security secretary; and Stephen J. Hadley, the former national security adviser.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said he was trying to persuade House Republicans to support the I.M.F. changes. “International organizations like the I.M.F. can provide stability at a time we really need it,” he said. “It’s a strategic tool for U.S. foreign policy. We would be shortsighted not to embrace these reforms.”

But Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, said the Obama administration was trying to take advantage of the crisis to advance unrelated policy goals. “This legislation is supposed to be about assisting Ukraine and punishing Russia, and the I.M.F. measure completely undercuts both of these goals by giving Putin’s Russia something it wants,” he said, although he missed the committee vote, citing jury duty in Miami.

Even as the administration lobbied for the bill, it also began holding the first test sale of crude oil from government reserves since 1990, a move officials said was planned months ago and yet still sent a message to Moscow that the United States could use its growing energy supplies to relieve Ukraine and other European nations dependent on Russia.

With Mr. Yatsenyuk at his side, Mr. Obama pledged again to “apply a cost” on Russia if it does not reverse course in Ukraine. “There’s another path available, and we hope that President Putin is willing to seize that path,” he said. “But if he does not, I’m very confident that the international community will stand strongly behind the Ukrainian government.”

Jonathan Weisman and Annie Lowrey contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on March 13, 2014,

on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline:

Obama Makes Diplomatic Push to Defuse Crisis in Ukraine.

    Obama Makes Diplomatic Push to Defuse Crisis in Ukraine,
    NYT, 12.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/13/world/europe/ukraine-washington.html

Kerry Warns Russia

Against Annexation of Crimea

MARCH 8, 2014
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State John Kerry warned his Russian counterpart on Saturday that steps by the Kremlin to annex Crimea would “close any available space for diplomacy,” a State Department official said.

Mr. Kerry’s warning came after leaders of Russia’s Parliament said they would support a move by Crimea to break away from Ukraine and become part of the Russian Federation.

He said during his recent trip to Europe that he had provided “suggestions” to Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, on how the crisis set off by Russia’s military intervention in Crimea might be resolved.

“We have made suggestions to Foreign Minister Lavrov, which he is currently taking personally to President Putin in Sochi,” the secretary of state said Thursday, after meeting with Mr. Lavrov in Rome.

A major element of the United States’ diplomatic strategy is to form a “contact group” that would include France, Britain, Germany, Russia and Ukraine, and perhaps others. Such a group would provide a forum to try to negotiate a political solution, as well as a mechanism for Ukrainian and Russian officials to begin their first face-to-face talks on the crisis.

The Obama administration has been trying for days to broker direct talks between Russia and Ukraine. Russia, however, has yet to agree to the idea.

In his call on Saturday, Mr. Kerry again sought to pursue a political solution while warning that Russian annexation of Crimea would bring such diplomatic efforts to a halt.

“The secretary underscored U.S. readiness to work with partners and allies to facilitate direct dialogue between Ukraine and Russia,” said the State Department official, who declined to be identified under the agency’s protocol for briefing reporters.

“At the same time, he made clear that continued military escalation and provocation in Crimea or elsewhere in Ukraine, along with steps to annex Crimea to Russia, would close any available space for diplomacy, and he urged utmost restraint,” the official said.

Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov agreed to speak again soon, the official added.

    Kerry Warns Russia Against Annexation of Crimea, NYT, 8.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/world/europe/
    kerry-warns-russia-against-annexation-of-crimea.html

Israel’s Choice

MARCH 5, 2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

In Washington this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel sounded two different notes about peace negotiations with the Palestinians, which are nearing a critical juncture. In a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby, he enthusiastically advocated a peace agreement as a means to improve Israel’s ties with its Arab neighbors and “catapult the region forward” on issues like health, energy and education.

But at other moments, a more familiar skepticism was apparent. He demanded that Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state with “no excuses, no delays.” In response, a senior Palestinian official, Nabil Shaath, accused Mr. Netanyahu of putting an end to peace talks because Palestinians have already rejected that designation. (Palestinians recognize Israel as a state, but not as a Jewish state because they believe that that would undercut the rights of Palestinian refugees.) And, on Monday, at the White House, Mr. Netanyahu asserted that while Israel has worked hard to advance peace, the Palestinians have not.

How much of this is posturing before the two sides face tough choices in their negotiations is unknown. But as President Obama noted in an interview with Bloomberg View, time is running out, and not just because the Americans will soon release a set of principles that are to serve as a framework for further talks on a final peace deal. Mr. Netanyahu and the Palestinians will have to decide whether to move forward on the basis of those principles, negotiated over months with the mediation of Secretary of State John Kerry, or reject them.

In remarkably blunt comments, Mr. Obama said that he had not heard a persuasive case for how Israel survives both as a democracy and a Jewish state absent a negotiated two-state solution, since in Israel and the West Bank “there are going to be more Palestinians, not fewer Palestinians, as time goes on.” He also warned that given Israel’s aggressive settlement construction — 2,534 housing units were begun in 2013 compared with 1,133 the previous year — Palestinians may soon decide that a contiguous state is impossible and America’s ability to help manage the consequences will be limited. Meanwhile, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who is committed to nonviolence, is aging; no one knows who will succeed him. These are the hard facts that need to be broadcast widely.

Negotiators have largely kept silent on details of the talks. But there are fears that the principles might tilt toward Israel, which would mean the final negotiations simply won’t get off the ground. For instance, there was a troubling report in the Palestinian newspaper Al Quds that said one proposal would give Palestinians just the neighborhood of Beit Hanina in East Jerusalem as their capital. The Palestinians have long claimed East Jerusalem, which was captured by Israel in the 1967 war, as their capital in a peace deal.

The framework is expected to call for an end to the conflict and all claims, following a phased Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank (based on the 1967 lines), with extensive new measures like drones and sensors in the Jordan Valley to address Israel’s security concerns. Israel will retain certain settlement blocs and the Palestinians will be compensated with Israeli territory.

President Obama is scheduled to meet with Mr. Abbas at the White House on March 17 and then go to Saudi Arabia, an important player in rallying Arab support for Mr. Abbas and the peace effort. In his Aipac speech, Mr. Netanyahu declared, “I’m prepared to make a historic peace with our Palestinian neighbors.” But, really, what other just and durable choice does he have? What is his long-term answer for Israel, if not a two-state solution?

A version of this editorial appears in print on March 6, 2014,

on page A28 of the New York edition with the headline:

Israel’s Choice.

    Israel’s Choice, NYT, 5.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/opinion/israels-choice.html

Pressure Rising

as Obama Works to Rein In Russia

 

MARCH 2, 2014
The New York Times
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — As Russia dispatched more forces and tightened its grip on the Crimean Peninsula on Sunday, President Obama embarked on a strategy intended to isolate Moscow and prevent it from seizing more Ukrainian territory even as he was pressured at home to respond more forcefully.

Working the telephone from the Oval Office, Mr. Obama rallied allies, agreed to send Secretary of State John Kerry to Kiev and approved a series of diplomatic and economic moves intended to “make it hurt,” as one administration official put it. But the president found himself besieged by advice to take more assertive action.

“Create a democratic noose around Putin’s Russia,” urged Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. “Revisit the missile defense shield,” suggested Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida. “Cancel Sochi,” argued Representative Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who leads the Intelligence Committee, referring to the Group of 8 summit meeting to be hosted by President Vladimir V. Putin. Kick “him out of the G-8” altogether, said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic whip.

The Russian occupation of Crimea has challenged Mr. Obama as has no other international crisis, and at its heart, the advice seemed to pose the same question: Is Mr. Obama tough enough to take on the former K.G.B. colonel in the Kremlin? It is no easy task. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told Mr. Obama by telephone on Sunday that after speaking with Mr. Putin she was not sure he was in touch with reality, people briefed on the call said. “In another world,” she said.

That makes for a crisis significantly different from others on Mr. Obama’s watch. On Syria, Iran, Libya and Egypt, the political factions in Washington have been as torn as the president over the proper balance of firmness and flexibility. But as an old nuclear-armed adversary returns to Cold War form, the consequences seem greater, the challenges more daunting and the voices more unified.

“It’s the most important, most difficult foreign-policy test of his presidency,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a career diplomat who became under secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration. “The stakes are very high for the president because he is the NATO leader. There’s no one in Europe who can approach him in power. He’s going to have to lead.”

Mr. Obama came to office with little foreign-policy experience and has been repeatedly tested by a new world in which the main threats are Islamic extremism and civil war. While increasing drone strikes and initially building up forces in Afghanistan, he has made it his mission to pull out of two long wars and keep out of any new ones.

But the limits of his influence have been driven home in recent weeks, with Syria pressing its war against rebels and Afghanistan refusing to sign an agreement allowing residual American forces. Now the Crimea crisis has presented Mr. Obama with an elemental threat reminiscent of the one that confronted his predecessors for four decades — a geopolitical struggle in the middle of Europe. First, the pro-Russian government in Kiev, now deposed, defied his warnings not to shoot protesters, and now Mr. Putin has ignored his admonitions to stay out of Ukraine.

Caught off guard, Mr. Obama is left to play catch-up. With thousands of reinforcements arriving Sunday to join what American officials estimated were 6,000 Russian troops, Mr. Putin effectively severed the peninsula, with its largely Russian-speaking population, from the rest of Ukraine.

“Russian forces now have complete operational control of the Crimean peninsula,” a senior administration official said on the condition of anonymity.

No significant political leaders in Washington urged a military response, but many wanted Mr. Obama to go further than he has so far. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, has already devised language to serve as the basis for possible bipartisan legislation outlining a forceful response, including sanctions against Russia and economic support for Ukraine.

The president has spoken out against Mr. Putin’s actions and termed them a “breach of international law.” But he has left the harshest condemnations to Mr. Kerry, who on Sunday called them a “brazen act of aggression” and “a stunning willful choice by President Putin,” accusing him of “weakness” and “desperation.”

In addition to Ms. Merkel, Mr. Obama spoke with his counterparts from Britain and Poland on Sunday and won agreement from all the other G-8 countries to suspend preparations for the Sochi meeting and find ways to shore up the economically fragile Ukrainian government. The administration also canceled a trade mission to Moscow and a Russian trip to Washington to discuss energy while vowing to also scrap a naval-cooperation meeting with Russia.

In television interviews, Mr. Kerry suggested that the United States might impose sanctions, boycott the Sochi meeting in June and expel Russia from the G-8. Germany, however, publicly expressed opposition to expulsion, an ominous sign for Mr. Obama since any meaningful pressure would need support from Berlin.

But Mr. Obama offered Russia what aides called an “offramp,” a face-saving way out of the crisis, by proposing that European observers take the place of Russian forces in Crimea to guard against the supposed threats to the Russian-speaking population cited by the Kremlin as justification for its intervention.

Mr. Obama’s aides said that they saw no evidence of such threats and considered the claim a bogus pretext, and that they wanted to call Mr. Putin’s bluff. Privately, they said they did not expect Mr. Putin to accept, and they conceded that Mr. Obama probably could not reverse the occupation of Crimea in the short term. They said they were focusing on blocking any further Russian move into eastern Ukraine that would split the country in half.

Some regional specialists said Mr. Obama should ignore the talk-tough chorus and focus instead on defusing a crisis that could get much worse. Andrew Weiss, a national security aide to President Bill Clinton, said the Obama administration should be trying to keep Ukraine and Russia from open war. “For us to just talk about how tough we are, we may score some points but lose the war here,” Mr. Weiss said.

The crisis has trained a harsh spotlight on Mr. Obama’s foreign policy, with critics asserting that he has been too passive.

Mr. Corker traced the origins of Mr. Putin’s brash invasion to September when, in the face of bipartisan opposition in Congress, Mr. Obama pulled back from plans to conduct an airstrike on Syria in retaliation for a chemical-weapons attack on civilians. Instead, he accepted a Russian offer to work jointly to remove the chemical weapons.

“Ever since the administration threw themselves into the arms of Russia in Syria to keep from carrying out what they said they would carry out, I think, he saw weakness,” Mr. Corker said of Mr. Putin. “These are the consequences.”

Of course, had Mr. Obama proceeded with an attack, he would have paid a different price for ignoring the will of Congress and the grave misgivings of an American public weary of war. Republicans who opposed confrontation in Syria insist this is different.

Mr. Rubio, who opposed authorizing force in Syria, agreed that that conflict had serious ramifications for American interests. But he said the showdown in Crimea was about freedom itself and the hard-fought American victory over totalitarianism in the Cold War. In that sense, even Republicans who opposed Mr. Obama in Syria were pushing for a hard line against Mr. Putin.

“The very credibility of the post-Cold War world and borders is at stake here,” Mr. Rubio said in an interview.

Obama aides reject the notion that he has underestimated Mr. Putin. From the beginning, they said, he had a cold-eyed assessment of the possibilities and limitations of engagement with Mr. Putin. And they noted that neither President Bush’s reputation for toughness nor his courtship of Mr. Putin stopped Russia from going to war in 2008 with another neighbor, the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

While Mr. Obama has not gone as far as many in Washington want him to go, the president has been less focused on immediate actions than on making sure he and America’s traditional allies are on the same page. Working from the Oval Office over the weekend, wearing jeans and a scowl, he called several of his G-8 counterparts to “make sure everybody’s in lock step with what we’re doing and saying,” according to a top aide.

Administration officials said Mr. Putin had miscalculated and would pay a cost regardless of what the United States did, pointing to the impact on Russia’s currency and markets. “What we see here are distinctly 19th- and 20th-century decisions made by President Putin to address problems,” one of the officials said. “What he needs to understand is that in terms of his economy, he lives in the 21st-century world, an interdependent world.”

Jonathan Weisman contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on March 3, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Pressure Rising as Obama Works to Rein in Russia.

    Pressure Rising as Obama Works to Rein In Russia,
    NYT, 2.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/03/world/europe/
    pressure-rising-as-obama-works-to-rein-in-russia.html

Putin Engages in Test of Will Over Ukraine

MARCH 2, 2014
The New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin has left little doubt he intends to cripple Ukraine’s new government, forcing it to make concessions or face the de facto partition of areas populated predominantly by ethnic Russians, from the Crimea to Odessa to the industrial heartland in the east.

That strategy has been pursued aggressively by subterfuge, propaganda and bold military threat, taking aim as much at the United States and its allies in Europe as Ukraine itself. The pivotal question now for Kiev and Western capitals, is how boldly Mr. Putin continues to push his agenda, risking a more heated military and diplomatic conflict.

So far, the Kremlin has shown no sign of yielding to international pressure — but it also has not taken the most provocative step yet, openly ordering Russian troops to reinforce those already in Crimea and expand its incursion into southern or eastern Ukraine.

Asked on Sunday about President Obama’s suspension of preparations to attend the Group of 8 summit meeting scheduled for June in Sochi — along with Canada, France and Britain — Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, replied cuttingly and dismissively. “It’s not a minus for Russia,” he said. “It will be a minus for the G-8.”

Mr. Putin has yet to make public remarks on the crisis in Ukraine, leaving his ultimate goals uncertain and unpredictable. Still, his strategy is aimed at blunting the impact of a popular uprising that sought to push the country away from Russia and deepen ties with Europe, and Mr. Putin has already left the fledgling government disorganized, discredited and forced to compromise on terms that would keep the country firmly within Russia’s sphere of influence, especially regarding the Crimea peninsula.

The Kremlin’s pledge to protect compatriots in Ukraine from suppression of a Western-minded majority mirrors Russia’s role in other disputed territories of the former Soviet republics over the years, including Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Those two breakaway regions of Georgia survived in a diplomatic limbo after the collapse of the Soviet Union with overt and covert Kremlin pressure until war erupted in 2008 and Russia routed ill-prepared Georgian troops.

Russia brushed aside strong warnings from the United States and others at the time and recognized them as independent countries — and paid little price for it in the long run. Mr. Putin appears to be calculating again that Russia is too important for other countries to respond more forcefully, despite warnings like those by Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday that the United States would consider an array of sanctions that could include freezing assets and travel of senior officials here.

“As brilliant as the man is, he has only one pattern,” Nina L. Khrushcheva, a professor of international affairs at the New School in New York, said of Mr. Putin. Ms. Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of Nikita S. Khrushchev, whose decision to cede Crimea to Kiev’s jurisdiction instead of Moscow’s in 1954 is a disputed legacy at the heart of Russia’s claims in Ukraine, added, “It’s a clever pattern, but he has only one.”

The stakes in Ukraine are, however, much higher than the war with Georgia. And given Ukraine’s strategic position in the center of Europe, so are the risks. Russia has significant trade with Ukraine, but even more so with Europe. Its gas monopoly, Gazprom, has already made it clear that it was prepared to forgo discounts on natural gas that Russia offered the government of President Viktor F. Yanukovych and to collect on the debt Ukraine already owes. As it did in 2006 and 2009, Russia could turn off the supply to Ukraine. But since its pipelines pass west through Ukraine, that would mean cutting off Russia’s largest customers in Europe, too.

Any escalation of Russia’s military intervention, especially if it meets resistance and bloodshed, will almost certainly rattle investors and plunge Russia’s unsteady economy into free fall. With the value of the ruble already falling, there was quick speculation of a rocky start when the stock market opens on Monday.

For now, such calculations appear to be secondary to the fury that the toppling of Mr. Yanukovych’s government has caused inside the Kremlin. Ukraine has deep historical, social and religious connections to Russia that are often underestimated in the United States, especially. More significantly, Mr. Putin and the close circle of aides he relies on most, view the overthrow of Mr. Yanukovych as a coup orchestrated by the West to undercut Russia’s vital interests.

Sergei Utkin, the head of the Department of Strategic Assessment, part of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that the relentless anti-Americanism on state media was in the past dismissed as crude propaganda that served a transparent political purpose but appeared now to reflect the actual worldview of the Kremlin. “It’s a catastrophe for Ukraine and for Russia,” he said. “The problem is that quite a few people in Russia don’t understand the consequences. They believe the country is strong and can do whatever it wants to do.”

How Mr. Putin perceives these events remains central to what happens next, experts said. Does he believe he has already succeeded by making clear that Russia has the will and the means to force its agenda in Ukraine? Or does he feel the job is only half done and that having stoked Russian nationalism, he has no choice but to plow ahead?

The deployment of Russian troops across Crimea — which Mr. Peskov refused to acknowledge — has already effectively severed Crimea from Ukrainian control, even as it provoked tense confrontation with Ukrainian troops at some bases. It allowed a new regional leader to plead for Russia’s protection and gave the Kremlin the pretense to oblige.

Ethnic Russian supporters — abetted by Russia’s secret services, according to Ukrainian and foreign officials — are now mounting demonstrations in other cities, including Kharkiv and Donetsk, that could lead to similar calls for Russian intervention.

The unanimous vote by Russia’s upper house of Parliament on Saturday night to authorize an intervention, after a debate that vilified the United States in ways reminiscent of the darkest periods of the Cold War, took place after the first Russian reinforcements had already begun arriving, according to Ukrainian and other Western officials. The vote nevertheless gave Mr. Putin a strong hand to play, threatening a much larger conventional military operation to protect “citizens and compatriots” in Ukraine, as Mr. Putin said in telephone conversations with Mr. Obama and the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, according to the Kremlin.

Mr. Peskov said that Mr. Putin had not yet ordered the operation but now had “the full array of options available to him” if the crisis worsened. He emphasized that Russia supported a unified Ukraine, but also argued that the country’s new leaders had violated the agreement brokered by the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland to establish a unity government that would leave Mr. Yanukovych in place as president until new elections in December.

He suggested a diplomatic resolution would begin with a return to the terms of those agreements. That would mean the dismissal of the new interim government that the United States and others have already endorsed and the return of Mr. Yanukovych, who appeared on Friday at a surreal news conference in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don after dropping out of sight for a week. “He may be the last man to present himself for the presidency,” Mr. Peskov said, reflecting the greatly diminished reputation of Mr. Yanukovych in Moscow now, “but he is the legitimate one.”

For now, though, with a large-scale military exercise in western Russian already underway, the country felt very much on a war footing. By Sunday, an information campaign swept like an orchestrated gust through state-controlled news media. There were frenetic reports of clashes in Ukraine, of fascist threats to ethnic Russians and of the flight — entirely unsubstantiated — of 675,000 Ukrainians crossing Russia’s frontier as refugees. (One channel, in fact, showed a short line of cars at Ukraine’s border with Poland, not Russia.) The official Channel One network canceled its live broadcast of the Academy Awards early on Monday morning here.

The authorities also authorized and evidently helped organize a rally of thousands of people supporting Mr. Putin and the “defense” of Russians in Ukraine on Sunday, while the police rounded up at least 360 people who attempted to rally against war outside the Ministry of Defense and the Kremlin, according to OVD-Info, an organization that monitors political prisoners.

The voices of dissent struggled to be heard over the drums of war. Sergei S. Mitrokhin, the leader of the liberal Yabloko Party, denounced the Federation Council’s vote as “giving a free hand to start a war with a brotherly people.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 3, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Putin Engages in Test of Will Over Ukraine.

    Putin Engages in Test of Will Over Ukraine, NYT, 2.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/03/world/europe/
    putin-engages-in-test-of-will-over-ukraine.html

A History Lesson That Needs Relearning

MARCH 1, 2014
The New York Times
By SAM TANENHAUS

SUDDENLY the specter of the Cold War is back. Prompted by the political crisis in Ukraine, some conservatives have called for President Obama to stand up to Vladimir V. Putin in the grand tradition of previous American presidents who stared eyeball to eyeball with Soviet leaders from Joseph Stalin to Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Mr. Obama came close on Friday. Responding to reports of Russian mobilization, he said, “There will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine.”

His critics acknowledge that times have changed. “No one wants a new Cold War,” a Wall Street Journal editorial put it, before going on to imply the opposite, that Mr. Obama could prevent a civil war in Eastern Europe “if he finally admits Vladimir Putin’s hostility to a free and democratic Europe and clearly tells protesting Ukrainians that we’re on their side.”

Such a sentiment inevitably conjures John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech before a crowd in West Berlin in 1963, or Ronald Reagan, on a visit there in 1987, urging the Soviets to “tear down this wall.”

More echoes of the Cold War surfaced in recent reports that Russia has been violating nuclear arms accords dating back to the Reagan years and alarmed reactions to the news of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s proposal to reduce the United States Army to a level not seen since before World War II.

Even Mr. Obama seemed to be drawing on the collective memory of old-time superpower struggles when he insisted recently that his administration’s approach to Ukraine was “not to see this as some Cold War chessboard in which we are in competition with Russia.”

That image of a chessboard — an epic contest between two giant players, carefully nudging their pieces around the globe as part of a grand strategy — has indeed become a familiar metaphor for the Cold War. But it is misleading. Many decisions remembered today for their farsighted, tactical brilliance were denounced in their day as weak-willed. And big, public gestures often made less difference than the small, hidden ones.

Born in tandem with the nuclear age, the Cold War was defined from the outset less by outright confrontation than by caution. And with caution came adjustment, compromise, improvisation and at times retreat. As often as not, both sides blinked.

The term surfaced in 1947, in Walter Lippmann’s book “The Cold War,” whose title was derived from a phrase “used in Europe during the late 1930s to characterize Hitler’s war of nerves against the French, sometimes described as la guerre blanche or la guerre froide,” as Ronald Steel wrote in his book “Walter Lippmann and the American Century.”

Lippmann, a dean of foreign policy realism, argued that policy should be made in the spirit of pragmatism, rather than as a global crusade against Communism that would require the headache, or worse, of “recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets.”

In fact the costliest maneuvers — chess-piece gambits in Korea and Vietnam — backfired, increasing tensions abroad even as they shook public confidence at home.

Overheated rhetoric often contributed to trouble. In 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected on a Republican platform that promised to replace the Communist containment strategy of President Harry S. Truman with a more aggressive “liberation” policy that would seize the initiative from the Soviet Union.

Yet throughout his two terms, Eisenhower consistently opted for stability over conflict. Arriving in Geneva for a summit with Nikita S. Khrushchev in July 1955, Eisenhower said he came bearing “the goodwill of America” and “the aspirations of America for peace.”

A year later, when Moscow sent two Red Army tank divisions to quell anti-Communist protesters in Budapest, killing as many as 30,000 people, the cry went up for action. “What are the West and the United Nations going to do?” one despairing protester asked an American reporter.

The answer: nothing. Counteraction would only provoke Moscow to tighten its noose and perhaps “go back on de-Stalinization,” Eisenhower explained.

To some this sounded like retreat. John W. McCormack, a Massachusetts Democrat, accused the Eisenhower administration of appeasement and said it was living in “a dream world” that was emboldening the Soviets.

A similar tone was struck recently when Senator John McCain said Mr. Obama was “the most naïve president in American history,” blind to the reality that Mr. Putin “wants to restore the Russian empire.” That second charge was also made (by Lippmann, among others) of Stalin and his successors.

Still, it did not stop Eisenhower from inviting Khrushchev to the United States in 1959, again angering conservatives, who mounted protests during the visit.

Later presidents followed Eisenhower’s example. Even the most celebrated war of nerves, the Cuban missile crisis, was resolved by a secret bargain: The Soviets agreed not to place missiles in Cuba, and the Kennedy administration agreed to remove missiles it had placed in Turkey.

Another cold warrior, Richard M. Nixon, got the country out of the Vietnam War and also cut deals with the Soviets, including an accord that reduced both nations’ stockpile of nuclear missiles.

Or consider the most hallowed of Republican Cold War presidents, Ronald Reagan. Early in his first term, he too faced a Ukraine-like emergency when the Solidarity movement was crushed in Poland. Many expected a powerful response. Instead he showed restraint. He voiced sympathy for the movement, but the assistance he provided came quietly — and covertly, in part — through money and communications equipment funneled to anti-Communists. Eventually, Poland and other Soviet satellites were freed, but the change was partly made possible after Reagan realized he could negotiate with Mr. Gorbachev.

Calculations like these are the true prologue to the approach that Mr. Obama seems to have adopted in trouble spots from Syria to Ukraine. Like Nixon, he wound down a war he inherited, this time in Iraq, just as his reliance on drones and cyberwarfare parallels Eisenhower’s avoidance of military operations. And his ambition to eliminate nuclear arsenals builds on the efforts of both Nixon and Reagan.

Perhaps it’s time the chessboard metaphor was retired. The truth is that the Cold War was less a carefully structured game between masters than a frightening high-wire act, with leaders on both sides aware that a single misstep could plunge them into the abyss.

Correction: March 1, 2014

An earlier version of this news analysis misstated John W. McCormack’s role at the time that he accused the Eisenhower administration of appeasement. He was a member of the House of Representatives; he was not yet the speaker of the House.

Sam Tanenhaus is a writer at large for The New York Times.

A version of this news analysis appears in print on March 2, 2014, on page SR4 of the New York edition with the headline: A History Lesson That Needs Relearning.

    A History Lesson That Needs Relearning, NYT, 1.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/sunday-review/
    a-history-lesson-that-needs-relearning.html

Kremlin Deploys Military in Ukraine,

Prompting Protest by U.S.

MARCH 1, 2014
The New York Times
By ALISON SMALE
and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine — Russian armed forces seized control of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula on Saturday, as the Russian Parliament granted President Vladimir V. Putin broad authority to use military force in response to the political upheaval in Ukraine that dislodged a Kremlin ally and installed a new, staunchly pro-Western government.

Russian troops stripped of identifying insignia but using military vehicles bearing the license plates of Russia’s Black Sea force swarmed the major thoroughfares of Crimea, encircled government buildings, closed the main airport and seized communication hubs, solidifying what began on Friday as a covert effort to control the largely pro-Russian region.

In Moscow, Mr. Putin convened the upper house of Parliament to grant him authority to use force to protect Russian citizens and soldiers not only in Crimea but throughout Ukraine. Both actions — military and parliamentary — were a direct rebuff to President Obama, who on Friday pointedly warned Russia to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

Mr. Obama accused Russia on Saturday of a “breach of international law” and condemned the country’s military intervention, calling it a “clear violation” of Ukrainian sovereignty.

In Crimea, scores of heavily armed soldiers fanned out across the center of the regional capital, Simferopol. They wore green camouflage uniforms with no identifying marks, but spoke Russian and were clearly part of a Russian mobilization. In Balaklava, a district of Sevastopol, a long column of military vehicles blocking the road to a border post bore Russian plates.

Large pro-Russia crowds rallied in the eastern Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Kharkiv, where there were reports of violence. In Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, fears grew within the new provisional government that separatist upheaval would fracture the country just days after a winter of civil unrest had ended with the ouster of President Viktor F. Yanukovych, the Kremlin ally who fled to Russia.

In addition to the risk of open war, it was a day of frayed nerves and set-piece political appeals that recalled ethnic conflicts of past decades in the former Soviet bloc, from the Balkans to the Caucasus.

Mr. Obama, who had warned Russia on Friday that “there will be costs” if it violated Ukraine’s sovereignty, spoke with Mr. Putin for 90 minutes on Saturday, according to the White House, and urged him to withdraw his forces back to their bases in Crimea and to stop “any interference” in other parts of Ukraine.

In a statement afterward, the White House said the United States would suspend participation in preparatory meetings for the G-8 economic conference to be held in Sochi, Russia, in June, and warned of “greater political and economic isolation” for Russia.

The Kremlin offered its own description of the call, in which it said Mr. Putin spoke of “a real threat to the lives and health of Russian citizens” in Ukraine, and warned that “in case of any further spread of violence to Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, Russia retains the right to protect its interests and the Russian-speaking population of those areas.”

In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron said that “there can be no excuse for outside military intervention” in Ukraine.

Canada said it was recalling its ambassador from Moscow and, like the United States, suspending preparations for the G-8 meeting.
 

At the United Nations, the Security Council held an emergency meeting on Ukraine for the second time in two days. The American ambassador, Samantha Power, called for an international observer mission, urged Russia to “stand down” and took a dig at the Russian ambassador, Vitaly I. Churkin, on the issue of state sovereignty, which the Kremlin frequently invokes in criticizing the West over its handling of Syria and other disputes.

“Russian actions in Ukraine are violating the sovereignty of Ukraine and pose a threat to peace and security,” she said.
Continue reading the main story

The secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, also spoke with Mr. Putin on Saturday and described himself as “gravely concerned” and urged Mr. Putin to negotiate with officials in Kiev.

Mr. Yanukovych’s refusal, under Russian pressure, to sign new political and free trade agreements with the European Union last fall set off the civil unrest that last month led to the deaths of more than 80 people, and ultimately unraveled his presidency. The country’s new interim government has said it will revive those accords.

Ukraine’s acting president, Oleksandr V. Turchynov, said at a briefing in Kiev on Saturday evening that he had ordered Ukraine’s armed forces “to full combat readiness.” A Ukrainian military official in Crimea said Ukrainian soldiers had been told to “open fire” if they came under attack by Russian troops or others though it was unlikely they could pose a serious challenge to Russian forces.

Officials in Kiev demanded that Russia pull back its forces, and confine them to the military installations in Crimea that Russia has long leased from Ukraine.

“The presence of Russian troops in Crimea now is unacceptable,” said acting Prime Minister Arseniy P. Yatsenyuk. Decrying the Russian deployment as a “provocation,” he added, “We call on the government of the Russian Federation to immediately withdraw its troops, return to the place of deployment and stop provoking civil and military confrontation in Ukraine.”

Sergey Tigipko, a former deputy prime minister of Ukraine and one-time ally of Mr. Yanukovych, said he flew to Moscow in hopes of brokering a truce.

The fast-moving events began in the morning, when the pro-Russia prime minister of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, declared that he had sole control over the military and the police, and appealed to Mr. Putin for Russian help in safeguarding the region. He also said a public referendum on independence would be held on March 30.

The Kremlin quickly issued a statement saying that Mr. Aksyonov’s plea “would not be ignored,” and within hours the upper chamber of Russia’s Parliament had authorized military action.

The authorization cited Crimea, where Russia maintains important military installations, but covered the use of force in the entire “territory of Ukraine.” Parliament also asked Mr. Putin to withdraw Russia’s ambassador to the United States.

By nightfall, the scores of armed men in uniform who first appeared on Crimea’s streets on Friday had melted away from the darkened center of Simferopol, vanishing as mysteriously as they arrived.

For the new government in Kiev, the tensions in Crimea created an even more dire and immediate emergency than the looming financial disaster that they had intended to focus on in their first days in office.

A $15 billion bailout that Mr. Yanukovych secured from Russia has been suspended because of the political upheaval, and Ukraine is in desperate need of financial assistance. Mr. Yatsenyuk, the acting prime minister, had said that the government’s first responsibility was to begin negotiations with the International Monetary Fund and start to put in place the economic reforms and painful austerity measures that the fund requested in exchange for help.

In Crimea, however, officials said they did not recognize the new government, and declared that they had taken control.

Mr. Aksyonov, the regional prime minister, said he was ordering the regional armed forces, the Interior Ministry troops, the Security Service, border guards and other ministries under his direct control. “I ask anyone who disagrees to leave the service,” he said.

As soldiers mobilized across the peninsula, the region’s two main airports were closed, with civilian flights canceled, and they were guarded by heavily armed men in military uniforms.

Similar forces surrounded the regional Parliament building and the rest of the government complex in downtown Simferopol, as well as numerous other strategic locations, including communication hubs and a main bus station.

Near the entrance to Balaklava, the site of a Ukrainian customs and border post near Sevastopol, the column of military vehicles with Russian plates included 10 troop trucks, with 30 soldiers in each, two military ambulances and five armored vehicles.

Soldiers, wearing masks and carrying automatic rifles, stood on the road keeping people away from the convoy, while some local residents gathered in a nearby square waving Russian flags and shouting, “Russia! Russia!”

As with the troops in downtown Simferopol, the soldiers did not have markings on their uniforms.

There were also other unconfirmed reports of additional Russian military forces arriving in Crimea, including Russian ships landing in Fedosiya, in eastern Crimea.

Crimea, while part of Ukraine, has enjoyed a large degree of autonomy under an agreement with the federal government in Kiev since shortly after Ukrainian independence from the Soviet Union.

The strategically important peninsula, which has been the subject of military disputes for centuries, has strong historic, linguistic and cultural ties to Russia. The population of roughly two million is predominantly Russian, followed by a large number of Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars, people of Turkic-Muslim origin.

In eastern Ukraine, which is also heavily pro-Russian, demonstrators in Kharkiv rallied and then seized control of a government building, pulling down the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag and raising the blue, white and red Russian one. Scores of people were injured as protesters scuffled with supporters of the new government in Kiev.

In Donetsk, also in the east, several thousand people held a rally in the city center, local news agencies reported, with many chanting pro-Russian slogans and demanding a public referendum on secession from Ukraine.

In Moscow, the parliamentary debate on authorizing military action was perfunctory, but laced with remarks that echoed the worst days of the Cold War. Underscoring the extent to which the crisis has become part of Russia’s broader grievances against the West, lawmakers focused on Mr. Obama and the United States as much as on the fate of Russians in Ukraine.

“All this is being done under the guise of democracy, as the West says,” Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, one member of Parliament, said during the debate. “They tore apart Yugoslavia, routed Egypt, Libya, Iraq and so on, and all this under the false guise of peaceful demonstrations.” He added, “So we must be ready in case they will unleash the dogs on us.”

Yuri L. Vorobyov, the body’s deputy chairman, said Mr. Obama’s warning on Friday was a cause for Russia to act. “I believe that these words of the U.S. president are a direct threat,” he said. “He has crossed the red line and insulted the Russian people.”

Correction: March 1, 2014

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname

of the ousted Ukrainian president.

He is Viktor F. Yanukovych, not Yanuovych.

Alison Smale reported from Simferopol,

and David M. Herszenhorn from Kiev, Ukraine.

Reporting was contributed by Noah Sneider

and Patrick Reevell from Simferopol;

Andrew Higgins from Sevastopol, Ukraine;

Andrew Roth from Moscow;

Somini Sengupta from the United Nations;

and Michael R. Gordon

and Michael D. Shear from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on March 2, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Kremlin Deploys Military to Seize Crimea.

    Kremlin Deploys Military in Ukraine, Prompting Protest by U.S.,
    NYT, 1.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/world/europe/ukraine.html