7 critical steps to crisis management
Before a crisis strikes, business owners should think about how a disaster would impact employees, customers, suppliers, the general public and their company's value. A crisis can strike any company anytime, anywhere. Advanced planning is the key to survival.
Daily headlines are filled with companies dealing with crisis. Is your company prepared? Just as BP learned with the gulf oil spill and Malaysian Airlines learned through two disasters, a crisis can strike at any time. However, unlike Fortune 500 firms, smaller companies are often unprepared and usually do not have a crisis plan in place. They believe it will never happen to them. But, what if it does?
How well would your company fare if you died in an auto accident on the way to work? Who would assume your role and continue operations? Suppose you own a retail company and you discover that one of your primary products or services has created a major health issue--what would you do? If you operate a construction company and an industrial accident has killed several key members of your team--how would you react?
Before a crisis strikes, business owners should think about how a disaster would impact employees, customers, suppliers, the general public and their company's value. A crisis can strike any company anytime, anywhere. Advanced planning is the key to survival. Here are seven critical steps to crisis management that every company should have in place regardless of its size.
1.Have a plan--Every plan begins with clear objectives. The objectives during any crisis are to protect any individual (employee or public) who may be endangered by the crisis, ensure the key audiences are kept informed, and the organization survives. This written plan should include specific actions that will be taken in the event of a crisis.
2. Identify a spokesperson--If the crisis could potentially impact the health or well-being of customers, the general public or employees, it may attract media attention. To ensure your company speaks with one voice and delivers a clear consistent message, a spokesperson must be identified as well as prepared to answer media questions and participate in interviews.
3. Be honest and open--Nothing generates more negative media coverage than a lack of honesty and transparency. Therefore, being as open and transparent as possible can help stop rumors and defuse a potential media frenzy. This transparency must be projected through all communications channels: news interviews, social media, internal announcements, etc.
4. Keep employees informed--Maintaining an informed workforce helps ensure that business continues to flow as smoothly as possible. It also minimizes the internal rumor mill that may lead to employees posting false reports on social media.
5. Communicate with customers and suppliers--You do not want customers and suppliers to learn about your crisis through the media. Information on any crisis pertaining to your organization should come from you first. Part of the crisis communications plan must include customers and suppliers and how they will be regularly updated during the event.
6. Update early and often--It is better to over-communicate than to allow rumors to fill the void. Issue summary statements, updated action plans and new developments as early and as often as possible. Remember that with today's social media and cable news outlets, we live in a time of the 24/7 news cycle. Your crisis plan must do the same.
7. Don't forget social media--The Ebola crisis and other recent major news events have all confirmed that social media is one of the most important channels of communications. Be sure to establish a social media team to monitor, post and react to social media activity throughout the crisis.
A crisis that is not managed well can wipe out decades of hard work and company value in a matter of hours. A well-managed crisis confirms that your company has the processes and procedures in place to address almost any issue that may develop.
Another critical component of crisis management planning is the establishment of a succession plan. You should clearly outline the necessary steps to follow if you suddenly become unable to perform your duties. This plan may include selling the company, or transferring ownership to family members or key employees.
What is most important is that you create the crisis management plan when everything is running smoothly and everyone involved can think clearly. By planning in advance, all parties will have time to seriously think about the ideal ways to manage different types of crises.
As you develop your crisis management plan, seek advice from the experts that include your leadership team, employees, customers, communications experts, investment bankers, exit planners, lawyers and financial managers. Each of these individuals can provide you valuable insight that could be critical should a crisis strike your company.
Crises and modern society
Public authorities face a variety of crises, such as natural disasters and environmental threats, financial meltdowns and terrorist attacks, epidemics and explosions, and information and communication technology (ICT) failures. Crises are not routine events (such as fires or traffic accidents). Crises are inconceivable events that often take politicians, citizens, and reporters by complete surprise. Crises occur when a community of people—an organization, a town, or a nation—perceives an urgent threat to core values or life-sustaining functions that must be urgently dealt with under conditions of deep uncertainty.
These dramatic events create tough challenges for public authorities and their organizations. Critical decisions must be made and implemented under considerable time pressure and in the absence of essential information about causes and consequences. Even if the conditions for effective action are severely impeded, citizens expect governmental leaders and public authorities to safeguard them from the threat at hand.
Two factors make it increasingly hard for these organizations and their leaders to meet this expectation. First, the qualities that increase welfare and drive progress in modern societies make these societies vulnerable to crises. Second, citizens and politicians alike have become at once more fearful and less tolerant of major hazards to public health, safety, and prosperity. The combination of these factors explains why relatively small disturbances can rapidly develop into deep crises and why the effects of crisis management are inherently limited.
Modern society has become increasingly complex and integrated. Complexity makes it hard to fully understand the manifold activities and processes that take place. As a result, emerging vulnerabilities can long go unrecognized; attempts to deal with them often produce unintended consequences (fueling rather than dampening the crisis). Tight coupling between a system’s component parts and with those of other systems facilitates the rapid proliferation of disturbances. Crises may, thus, have their roots far away (in a geographical sense) but rapidly snowball through the global networks, jumping from one system to another, gathering destructive potential along the way.
All this makes it hard to recognize a crisis before its consequences materialize. When a crisis begins to unfold, policy makers often do not see anything out of the ordinary. Everything is still in place, even though hidden interactions eat away at the pillars of the system. It is only when the crisis is in full swing and becomes manifest that policy makers can recognize it for what it is. Once a crisis has escalated into view, authorities can only try to minimize its consequences.
The contested nature of a crisis further complicates the situation. A crisis rarely, if ever, “speaks for itself.” The definition of a situation is subjective; one person’s crisis is another person’s opportunity. For public authorities, this spells trouble: many seemingly innocent events can be transformed into crises. Western citizens have grown impatient with imperfections. They have come to fear glitches and have learned to see more of what they fear. In this culture of fear—sometimes referred to as the “risk society”—the modern mass media plays an amplifying role.
Even if consensus would exist that a serious threat is emerging, the status of this new problem is far from assured. Governments deal with urgent problems every day; attention for one problem takes away attention from another. For a threat to be recognized as a crisis, it must clear firmly entrenched hurdles.
Challenges of crisis management
Crisis management has two dimensions. The technical dimension pertains to the coping capacity of governmental institutions and public policies in the face of emerging threats. But there is also a political dimension: crisis management is a deeply controversial and intensely political activity. A combination of these dimensions translates into five critical challenges of crisis management: sense making, decision making, meaning making, terminating, and learning.
Recognizing and making sense of crises
A crisis seems to pose a straightforward challenge: once a crisis becomes manifest, crisis managers must take measures to deal with its consequences. However, reality is much more complex. Most crises do not materialize with a big bang; they are the product of escalation. Policy makers must recognize from vague, ambivalent, and contradictory signals that something out of the ordinary is developing. They must appraise the threat and decide what the crisis is about.
Crisis managers often have a hard time meeting this challenge. The bewildering pace, ambiguity, and complexity of a crisis can easily overwhelm normal modes of situation assessment. Stress and organizational problems may further impair the ability to recognize and make sense of a crisis.
Some categories of people are known for their ability to remain cool and to stay clear-headed under pressure. They have developed a mode of information processing that enables competent performance under crisis conditions. Veteran military officers, journalists, and fire and police commanders are known for this. Some organizations have developed a proactive culture of “looking for problems” in their environment. These organizations have somehow developed a capacity for thorough yet fast-paced information processing under stressful conditions. The unresolved question is whether organizations can design these features into existing organizational cultures.
Column: From crisis management to crisis manipulation: The political strategy
In 2008, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told the Wall Street Journal, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Emanuel, it turns out, was a soothsayer.
At the time, the idea that people’s pain could be used as a political tool was unseemly. We have since shifted from when crises were managed into a period where crises are manipulated for political advantage.
We effectively have three political power centers in the nation right now – the president, Republicans and the Democrats. Trump’s power base is more personal than political. Therefore, his loyalty to traditional Republican policies, stances or platforms is weak. In effect, he’s become the Party of Trump. The GOP, however, is inexorably tied to Trump and fights daily to be with him before they end up against him while Democrats play an endless game of Clue. This reality has changed the dynamics of American politics so dramatically that the political parties are suffering from whiplash.
Consider the recent devastating hurricane that pummeled the Carolinas. Weather emergencies are generally opportunities for presidents to show their leadership skills and appear strong in front of the electorate. However, rather than focusing on mitigating Florence’s fury, Trump chose to relitigate the federal government’s response to another storm – Hurricane Maria - that nearly destroyed Puerto Rico a year ago.
Trump’s handling of Hurricane Maria has been widely criticized. The island still hasn’t fully recovered and nearly a million boxes of water were recently discovered sitting on a runway for the past year, while thousands have lived without clean water. Despite these findings, the President continued to assert his administration’s efforts in Puerto Rico were “incredibly successful.” Trump disputed the independent reporting saying “3,000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico” and the death toll had been inflated “by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible.”
And indeed, Democrats have used the death toll discrepancy to pound the president. Democrat Sen. Richard Blumenthal said the president’s claim of success, was “an insult to the brave men and women who everyday provide medical care and other first responder aid to people in distress situations.” While Sen. Elizabeth Warren tweeted, it was “a flat-out lie” and Sen. Bob Menendez tweeted, “You’re right, Mr. President. The Hurricane didn’t kill 3,000 people. Your botched response did.” Why is there a battle over who handles crises better?
In a 2009 study, leading communication researchers Arjen Boin, Allan McConnell and Paul ‘t Hart, analyzed how some leaders increase political support in times of crises while others become irreparably damaged. The successful ones, they said, have the ability to “exploit a crisis.” It appears we are now in a time when crisis exploitation is the political strategy du jour.
Wikipedia credits 61 different “controversies” to the Trump administration with a little over 600 days into the administration. The challenge for pols in this environment is to successfully guess what the next crisis will be and determine how to best take advantage of it. The fall election strategy appears to hinge on this phenomenon. The parties are no longer content to fire up their bases with policy initiatives, grand ideas for issue-based change or even a call to party loyalty. Instead, they seek to seize on the latest crisis and work it to their advantage.
To be fair, political parties have long used issues and events to motivate potential voters. What is new is the pace, the ferocity and the president’s proclivity to revel in controversy that has turned the political landscape upside down. Individual candidates and political parties in this Alice in Wonderland climate will have their crisis chops tested, tortured and tested again as they seek to gain political advantage from now until November.
Nowadays, it’s a political crisis to miss an opportunity.
President Trump's Disgraceful Peace Deal with the Taliban
David French is a senior editor at The Dispatch and a columnist for Time. His next book, Divided We Fall, will be released in 2020. He is a former major in the United States Army Reserve.
There is a difference between peace and retreat. The Trump administration’s agreement with the Taliban represents a full retreat. It’s an agreement that most Republicans would deplore if a Democrat president made the deal, and they’d be right to be angry.
Let’s begin with the elephant in the room. There is no meaningful argument that the fate of Afghanistan is somehow irrelevant to our national security. The War in Afghanistan was no “war of choice.” On 9/11 our nation suffered its worst attack since Pearl Harbor. It suffered its worst attack on an American city since the British burned Washington D.C. on August 24, 1814, and the Taliban were intimately involved. That attack came from an enemy operating with the permission and under the protection of the same Taliban the Trump administration deals with today.
It is true that the conflict in Afghanistan has been long (19 years), deadly (more than 2,400 Americans have lost their lives), and frustrating. It is true that Americans want it to end. And a true peace deal would bring welcome relief not just to the United States, but also to an Afghan nation that has seen indescribable pain and suffering. But there is no hope for peace when your opponent intends to continue the fight, and the hope for peace diminishes further still when the proposed peace agreement diminishes allies and strengthens your enemies.
If you read the peace agreement itself, you’ll note immediately that it gives the Taliban a series of concrete, measurable gifts. First, there’s an immediate allied withdrawal – down to 8,600 American troops (and proportionate numbers of allied troops) within 135 days. The remainder of American and allied forces will leave within 14 months.
At the same time, the United States will immediately and substantially reinforce the Taliban by seeking the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners by March 20. Even worse, the United States further agreed to a goal of “releasing all remaining prisoners over the course of the subsequent three months.” It will do this at the same time that it commits to the “goal” of removing sanctions from members of the Taliban that include travel bans, asset freezes, and an arms embargo.
The combination of the planned American retreat and the planned prisoner release would represent a substantial change in the balance of forces in Afghanistan. This would come without any agreement by the Taliban to cease hostilities against our allies.
At this point, the deal looks worse than a simple withdrawal. America can leave all on its own without also agreeing to seek the release of Taliban prisoners. It can leave all on its own without promising to ease sanctions. So why agree to the additional concessions?
America is making these concrete concessions in exchange for unenforceable promises from an untrustworthy enemy. The Taliban promise that they will not allow its members or members of al-Qaeda to use Afghan soil to threaten American national security. The promise to “send a clear message” that those who threaten the United States “have no place in Afghanistan.” Yet the agreement released to the public provides no verification or enforcement provisions for these assurances, and once America is out of Afghanistan, our ability to enforce those promises absent a new, substantial military buildup will be limited to nonexistent.
In other words, we will be placing our faith in the Taliban to help protect American national security.
There are frustrated Americans who will accept this agreement regardless of the terms. They’ll consent to the betrayal of our allies and the reinforcement of our enemy because they believe we’ve “failed” and that it’s time to end the “endless war.” But we must reject the narrative of failure, and phrases like “endless war” shed more heat than light.
The American military in Afghanistan has not failed in its ultimate objective since 9/11. It has kept America safe from any terrible repeat of that dreadful day. It has removed the Taliban from power, and denied Al-Qaeda and other enemies the safe havens they need to reconstitute and re-emerge as a worldwide terrorist menace. No, we have not extinguished the Taliban, and no we have not transformed Afghanistan. But we have defended our nation, and we are now defending our nation while suffering only a small fraction of the casualties (and deploying a fraction of the troops) from the height of the Afghan war.
And debates about “endless war” all too often presume that our conflicts with jihadists can end on our command. They cannot. If jihadists do not choose to lay down their arms, our best efforts to end America’s long conflict will come to naught. Indeed, our very effort to extricate ourselves from these conflicts can end up bolstering our enemies and harming our national security.
We’re forgetting the lessons of our recent past. In 2011, the Obama administration removed the last remaining military footprint from Iraq. It did so when American enemies in Iraq were far weaker than American enemies in Afghanistan. And, unlike the Trump administration, it did not deliberately seek to reinforce those enemies as it left. Yet three years later, American forces were back. The rise of ISIS led to killing on a mass scale and metastasized the international terror threat under ISIS. America was compelled to respond.
The bad faith of the Taliban is already evident. There are reports today of renewed fighting between the Taliban and Afghan security forces, and the Taliban have reportedly already rejected any talks with the Afghan government until the Afghans release 5,000 Taliban prisoners. The Afghan government is understandably reluctant to simply give thousands of reinforcements back to its deadly enemy.
A war-weary American public should resist the Trump administration’s retreat. It should not tolerate any agreement that reinforces and strengthens the Taliban. There are things that are worse than “endless war,” and if we doubt that truth, there is a memorial in downtown Manhattan that should remind us that mortal threats can emerge even from the farthest reaches of the earth.
The US operation in Iraq could come to an embarrassing end. Iran's power will only grow
How the US and Iran became enemies
Iran admits to shooting down Ukrainian passenger plane
(CNN)Donald Trump hasn't pulled his troops out of Iraq, despite his pledge to end America's grinding wars. It turns out he may not have to. The US is facing the possibility of being kicked out, and that would be a big win for Iran.
Officials in Iraq's parliament, where powerful blocs have unbreakable ties to Tehran, started a process to end the presence of foreign troops in the country, in a clear riposte to the US after it killed top Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike in Baghdad two weeks ago.
In the wake of the strike, joint US-Iraqi operations against ISIS were put on hold, and Iraq's caretaker prime minister said a US troop withdrawal was the only way to "protect all those on Iraqi soil," though this week he said that decision would be up to the next government.
But a US withdrawal could bring even more trouble, experts say. ISIS continues its attacks in the country, and without US and other foreign troops, the group would have more room to resurge. At the same time, Iran will be able to expand its already far-reaching powers in Baghdad.
Tehran and Washington have competed for influence in Iraq since the US 2003 invasion, and in that battle, Iran is already winning. Its consistent and coherent strategy, which the US lacks, has allowed Tehran to gradually weave itself into the fabric of everyday life in Iraq.
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It has capitalized on years of war and occupation to form militia groups that have become official factions of the Iraqi military, while economically, it provides an enormous amount of exports that Iraqis have come to rely on. It has made surrogates out of senior Iraqi government officials and members of parliament.
Because of those links, the Iraqi parliament's decision to side with Iran after the attack on Soleimani is not surprising. The strike appears to have backfired, to the benefit of Iran's long-term goal: getting the US out of the region.
"Iran is the most influential state in Iraq now," said Fawaz Gerges, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. "That power is only going to grow if the US leaves."
He said that the most important challenge for Iraq now was not ISIS, but rebuilding a working nation -- fighting corruption, changing the sectarian-based government to one based on citizenship and professionalizing the army, for example. Iran isn't interested in those goals, Gerges said, and a US withdrawal would embolden it further its reach across the Middle East.
"If the US leaves, people across the region will think that despite his flowery rhetorical devices, Trump does not really have a strategy for the Middle East and at the end of the day will fold and go home," Gerges said.
Being forced out would be a humiliating end to the US' long mission in Iraq, which has sucked up hundreds of billions of US taxpayers' money and left thousands of US soldiers dead.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has denied the US will leave, but pointed to a possible reduction of numbers. Gerges sees that proposal as a face-saving exercise for the US that could allow the American troops to stay in small numbers for the fight against ISIS but essentially begin the process of withdrawal.
How Iran got a hold on Iraq
Much of Iran's power in Iraq comes through militia groups that have roots in the 1980s Iraq-Iran war. Recruiting fighters from Iraq wasn't that difficult. Iraq was a Shia-majority nation led for more than two decades by brutal dictator Saddam Hussein, born a Sunni.
Iran, which has long pitched itself as the world's leader of Shia Muslims, took in Shia prisoners of war and refugees, and turned them into soldiers who would go back to Iraq to act in Tehran's interests, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Some became part of what is now known as the Badr Organization, the report said, both a militia group and an anti-US political party in Iraq today.
"Because of the institutional organizational capacity of those paramilitary groups, when Saddam fell and the repression that contained them ended, they flourished. They had the capacity to expand and to operate more overtly," said Jack Watling, a specialist in land warfare at the London-based Royal United Services Institute.
The fight against ISIS provided another recruitment opportunity for Iran, particular after the terrorist group took Mosul and the Iraqi military collapsed. It was at this time the Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs), a coalition of mostly Shia militias, formed and became a powerful force in the country, in the absence of a real army. They have since been officially folded into Iraq's military.
According to Watling, there are now around 113,000 salaried personnel in the powerful Tehran-backed Iraqi militia group. Of those, some 60,000 are actively deployable as fighters, and of those, 36,000 are directed by Iran.
In the 2018 Iraqi elections, the political wing of the PMUs, Fatah, won the second-highest number of seats in parliament, giving another powerful voice to Iranian interests in the Iraqi government.
Economically, Iran has ensured Iraq is dependent on it for energy, seeking loopholes and waivers from the US to get around sanctions and sell energy to its neighbor. Iraq is also Iran's second most important destination for its exports, after China, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, so Tehran wants to ensure its market across the border is well secured.
Trump sends mixed messages
As Iran made steady headway in the Iraqi government and military, the US' objective in Iraq has changed so many times that it's become muddy and unfocused. Iraqi officials are growing weary of the changes that have come with each new US president, and the mixed signals being sent by the Trump administration.
Pompeo is struggling to send the message that the US is in Iraq to fight ISIS, while strikes on Iranians there and comments from Trump indicate otherwise.
Last year, Trump admitted in an interview with CBS News that he wanted to keep a base in Iraq "because I want to be looking a little bit at Iran because Iran is a real problem." The comment provoked Tehran, and sowed confusion in Iraq.
Watling said the US appears to have shifted its interests in Iraq from countering ISIS to countering Iran.
"If the US said our objective is a strong and stable Iraq, then in many ways their best course of action would be to collaborate closely with the Iranians. But it's not. Their wish to counter the Iranian government in many ways overrides their wish to support the Iraqi state. There are contradictions in US policy in the region," he said.
Watling questioned what Trump's "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran was aiming to achieve. Iran's long-term strategy in Iraq, on the other hand, is paying off.
"We have seen a broadly unified attempt to ensure that Iran underwrites and limits Baghdad's military capability and that they retain Iraq as a market for their exports and as an economic partner," he said.
Winning hearts and minds
Despite achieving the regime change the US was looking for, with the capture and execution of Saddam, the US left Iraq in 2011 with an unsteady government in place. It had no choice but to send troops back to put out fires with the spread of ISIS. Iran also took part in the fight against ISIS, but it continued with its drive to boost influence in Iraq.
But Iran is failing in one key area. It hasn't really won the hearts of the people.
Anti-government protesters galvanized by deep economic grievances that have accumulated over many years have found themselves facing off with Iranian-backed forces.
Demonstrators were rallying against endemic corruption and cronyism, which they blame on "confessionalism," a system of government introduced by the US that divides power based on sectarian affiliation. While Iran didn't create that status quo, it has had a stake in maintaining it.
In video footage of some of the demonstrations, protesters can be heard yelling chants against both Iran and the US. Young Iraqis in particular don't want either the US or Iran in their country, said Joost Hitermann, who leads the International Crisis Group's Middle East and North Africa program.
"Iraqis want to get rid of both. Some might like one more than they other, and they don't want just one of the two alone there, to dominate their country," Hitermann said.
"Shia Iraqis may be loosely aligned with Iran, but they don't subscribe to the Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Iranian way is not all what Shia Iraqis want."
CNN's Tamara Qiblawi contributed to this report.
Who are the Kurds, and why is Turkey attacking them?
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Kurdish fighters in northern Syria have served as a crucial U.S. ally in the fight against the Islamic State. But U.S. troops stepped aside last week as Turkey launched an offensive against the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces.
President Trump has faced pressure even from Republicans as he has defended his decision not to intervene against the Turkish incursion, which many see as abandoning an ally in the face of extreme danger. Kurdish forces have described the U.S. departure as “a stab in the back.”
[Russia and Turkey reach deal to push Kurdish forces out of zone in northern Syria]
“Some want us to send tens of thousands of soldiers to the area and start a new war all over again,” Trump tweeted Thursday. “Others say STAY OUT and let the Kurds fight their own battles. I say hit Turkey very hard financially with sanctions if they don’t play by the rules.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had threatened to move into northeastern Syria for months. Here’s why he went ahead with it.
Who are the Kurds?
The Kurds are members of a large, predominantly Muslim ethnic group. They have their own cultural and linguistic traditions, and most speak one of two major dialects of the Kurdish language. After World War I, Western powers promised Kurds their own homeland in the agreement known as the Treaty of Sèvres. But a later agreement instead divided them among Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran.
Today, there are about 30 million Kurds living across the region, with about half of them in Turkey. Iraq is the only country in the region to have established an autonomous Kurdish region, known as Iraqi Kurdistan. Its parliament was founded in 1992.
“The Kurds have been suppressed in all sorts of ways, often very violently,” said Henri Barkey, a professor of international relations at Lehigh University and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “They have really suffered at the hands of the four states.”
Omer Taspinar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that for decades Turkey has had a policy of “assimilating the Kurds into Turkish ethnic identity, denial of Kurdish ethnic identity and denial of Kurdish linguistic rights.”
Kurds in Turkey are free to be Kurds, he said, only if they accept that they’re Turkish citizens. “The problem begins when they want a hyphenated identity,” Taspinar said.
Why is the United States allied with Syrian Kurds?
The United States needed a reliable ally in northeastern Syria in the fight against the Islamic State. In 2015, with Washington’s support, Kurdish forces belonging to the Kurdish People’s Protection Unit, or YPG, joined forces with Arab groups and created the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF. The United States, Britain, France and other countries provided the SDF with weapons. Since then, Kurdish fighters have led the alliance, which was crucial in toppling the Islamic State.
Why did Erdogan launch the offensive now?
As the SDF became crucial to the U.S. mission to defeat the Islamic State, Turkey grew fearful that the Kurdish forces were gaining influence close to the Turkish border, establishing institutions and gaining clout with the Americans, experts said.
Inside its own borders, Turkey has for years tried to counter the threat of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, a militant group that has regularly launched attacks across the country in the name of Kurdish nationalism. Tens of thousands of people have been killed in that conflict over the past few decades.
For Erdogan, countering the PKK takes precedence over fighting the Islamic State. “There is no real nationalist anger against ISIS, but there is nationalist anger against PKK,” Taspinar said. (The Islamic State is also known as ISIS.) Erdogan sees the Kurdish fighters in northeastern Syria as terrorists linked to the PKK.
For years, Turkey has hosted millions of refugees from the Syrian civil war. Now, as Turkey faces a severe economic crisis, Erdogan is facing pressure to resolve the refugee and unemployment crises in one go.
Erdogan has pledged to clear this corner of Syria of Kurdish fighters and then set up a “safe zone” to which Turkey will return at least a million Syrian refugees. That plan has raised alarm in humanitarian circles, where advocates fear that refugees will be forcibly returned to a conflict zone in violation of international law. Kurdish forces are guarding a network of Islamic State prisons in the region, raising fears that if they were to abandon their posts to escape the Turkish offensive, those prisoners could escape.
What about the Syrian government?
Until now, the Kurdish forces had restricted their military action to fighting the Islamic State and rebel groups in an effort to avoid clashes with the Syrian government -- another foe. But on Sunday, the Kurds struck a deal with the Syrian government after finding themselves unable to stop the Turkish onslaught. On Monday, forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad took up positions in previously Kurdish-controlled towns across northeastern Syria.
The deal was reached only after Russia intervened and held three days of negotiations between the Syrian government and SDF -- a major coup for Russia-backed Assad and a blow to Kurdish and U.S. influence.
It’s also significant as Kurdish groups had struggled against the authoritarian rule of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for years before.
When popular uprisings swept across Syria in 2011, the Kurds saw an opportunity. In July 2012, Kurdish-led forces drove the regime out of their areas. After that, Syrian Kurds created local councils to replace government establishments, and promoted public ownership of land, water, and other resources, as well as gender equality. Many Kurdish fighters are women.
They have also faced some accusations of abuse. In 2014, Human Rights Watch reported that arbitrary arrests and killings were taking place in Kurdish-controlled areas. And last year, the advocacy group said Kurdish forces were forcibly recruiting children to join their ranks. The SDF has repeatedly denounced these accusations.
What has happened so far?
Thousands of civilians have fled their homes on both the Syrian and Turkish sides of the border, with the United Nations reporting Thursday that at least 70,000 Syrians were already displaced because of the latest escalation in the conflict. Days into the Turkish offensive, dozens of civilians and fighters have reportedly been killed on both sides.
On Saturday, the official SDF Twitter account stated that more than 200 people had been killed and wounded since Wednesday. “Today we are fighting on two fronts, one against the Turkish invasion and one against the ISIS mercenaries,” the group said.
Over the weekend, gruesome videos circulated online that purported to show Turkish-aligned Syrian fighters committing execution-style killings.
Then on Sunday, a Turkish air strike hit a convoy in the Syrian border town of Ras al Ain, killing at least 14 people and wounding 10 more, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The SDF said the convoy included civilians and journalists.
Thu, Jan 2, 2020
Iraq: It’s not over yet
A member of Iraqi security forces stands near burning tyres at the reception room of the U.S. Embassy, during a protest to condemn air strikes on bases belonging to Hashd al-Shaabi (paramilitary forces), in Baghdad, Iraq January 1, 2020. REUTERS/Thaier al-Sudani
Iran, Iraq, and the Trump Administration were on the verge of a history-making crisis when tensions eased after the New Year’s Day withdrawal of Iran’s proxy militias from outside the US Embassy in Baghdad. Iranian-backed militia members went home after an intense campaign of diplomacy with and among Iraqi political actors, and after a Twitter standoff between US President Donald Trump and Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
No one should think this crisis is over. Iran’s stepped-up campaign to drive the United States out of Iraq will continue in other ways.
This most recent escalation was the result of a several-months’ campaign by Kataib Hezbollah (KH) against US forces, culminating in rocket attacks on Friday, December 27, 2019, at an Iraqi base near Kirkuk that killed an American contractor. In retaliation, on Sunday, December 29, the United States struck three KH sites in Iraq, as well as two KH bases in Syria that help move weapons and personnel from Iran through Iraq into Syria. On December 31, KH militia forces and their pro-Iranian allies among the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) tried to storm the US Embassy compound.
The danger of war during this crisis is real
One reason this crisis posed a real danger of war is that the United States and Iran look at this crisis differently. United States military and defense experts understand escalation dominance, in which a series of incremental measures are intended to pressure an adversary to change course. Going immediately to all-out war would be seen as unsupportable, so lesser measures are used first until ultimately the adversary desists.
Thus, when KH crossed a red line on December 27 by killing an American, the United States felt it had no choice but to respond with strikes against KH. If Iranian-backed militias had actually gotten into the US embassy and seized Americans, Washington would fear a repeat of the 2012 Benghazi attack that then-Congressman Michael Pompeo (R‑KS) used as a cudgel against then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or, worse, a repeat of the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran that helped defeat US President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election. The Pentagon would probably have pushed for US military action, first to liberate any hostages and then, once any hostages were freed, the United States would probably have launched strikes against Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) forces in Iran itself. Unlike on June 20, President Trump would not call off this strike at the last minute, for fear of looking “terrible” or “dumb,” as Trump claimed previous presidents acted in comparable situations. In all likelihood, Iran and the United States would then have found themselves in a shooting war.
Iran, on the other hand, thinks that since the May 2018 US withdrawal from the nuclear deal it is defending itself against economic warfare waged by the United States, in partnership with Israel and Saudi Arabia, to bring about an end to the Iranian Revolution and Iran’s clerical regime. IRGC Quds Force (IRGC-QF) chief Qasim Soleimani no doubt considers himself a master of asymmetric warfare and the use of proxies whose actions give Iran deniability. Vital to Iran’s security is preventing Iraq from ever being a threat, as Iraq was during the devastating 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War. This is one reason why Iran’s IRGC-QF is using the Lebanese model of parallel security forces under Iran’s influence or control, but outside the control of the internationally recognized and democratically elected Iraqi government.
Put this way, it is obvious that the US model of escalation in Iraq will not deter Iran from any of its strategic goals, including ending US military and political power in Iraq. The most likely outcome of the New Year’s withdrawal by KH is that Iran will pursue the same goals using different means. Let’s look at four of Iran’s more likely options.
Iran could continue to pressure the United States to close its embassy
US Secretary of State Pompeo was responsible for the September 2018 decision to pull US diplomats out of Basra, southern Iraq’s largest city, and for recent efforts to permanently reduce the number of US personnel in the Baghdad Embassy under the mistaken idea that this would reduce the risk to remaining US personnel. In fact, these actions have emboldened Iran and KH to think that the United States can be forced into a humiliating withdrawal from what was, at one time, the largest US embassy in the world. Expect Iranian efforts to continue.
“…these actions have emboldened Iran and KH…”
Forcing the US embassy to close would not mean the end of US influence in Iraq, if the US military stayed in its bases outside of Baghdad and diplomats relocated to Iraqi Kurdistan. It would, however, considerably diminish US influence, as happened when the United States closed its embassy in Sanaa, Yemen in 2015. It would also be seen as a humiliating defeat for the Trump Administration and would make the forced departure of the US military much more likely.
The United States needs a strategy for maintaining a diplomatic presence in Iraq even in the face of what Iran is doing. A repeat of Trump’s decision to withdraw from northeastern Syria would be hard to paint as anything other than a retreat under fire and would make the world far more dangerous for American diplomats and businesses overseas. Even more than President Trump wants to show his base he is staying out of Middle East conflicts, he does not want pictures of helicopters on the roof as in 1975 Saigon or American diplomats in blindfolds with tied hands as in 1979 Tehran.
The Iraqi parliament is the next arena of US-Iran conflict
The United States has been clear since the occupation ended in 2004 that its continued military presence in Iraq is based on a request from the democratically elected Iraqi government. Since 2014, the United States has also justified its military presence in Iraq as necessary to defeat the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) and to keep ISIS from re-emerging—which ISIS is now doing. But in the context of US-Iran relations, US reliance on the consent of the Iraqi government creates a strategic “vulnerability” that Iran has toyed with in the past—and is now likely to pursue with greater effort: getting the Iraqi Council of Representatives (COR) to adopt a law that would compel US forces to leave Iraq.
As with Lebanon, Iran’s proxies in Iraq are well-represented in the Iraqi parliament, but they do not control it. Iran may have cynically used KH to provoke the United States into attacking KH on Iraqi soil, which would (and did) kill some KH members, but also could increase the number of Iraqi parliamentarians who will vote to expel US forces.
This now makes the Speaker of the Iraqi parliament, Mohamed al-Halbousi, one of the most important parliamentarians in all the Middle East. He has substantial authority to determine whether and under what conditions there would be debate or a floor vote on any parliamentary effort to expel US forces. Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, now in a caretaker role, may no longer be able to prevent Iranian-backed parliamentarians from introducing a measure that would compel US forces to leave. Al-Halbousi, the former governor of western Iraq’s Anbar province and a Sunni, is strong enough to prevent such a bill from getting to a final vote, especially if he gets support from Iraq’s substantial bloc of Kurdish parliamentarians.
Iran will keep trying to force Iraq to pick a pro-Iranian prime minister
The Iranians are already working on trying to get the Iraqis to select a pro-Iranian, anti-American prime minister who will create conditions that require the Americans to leave. The next prime minister needs to come from a large bloc in the Iraqi parliament—Iraqis are debating what that means—and needs to be nominated by Iraqi President Barham Salih, who represented the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan for many years in the United States. Only one or two Mideast officials know the United States as well as Salih. Salih has rejected three pro-Iranian prime ministerial candidates thus far. He knows that millions of Iraqis, including many who have taken to the streets opposing corruption and Iranian influence, will not accept a prime minister who is in Iran’s pocket.
Iran could seize power in Iraq by extra-constitutional means
Iran and its proxies could, for example, take physical control over the current Iraqi prime minister, stage a coup, or carry out a Tiananmen Square-style massacre of anti-Iranian Iraqi protesters. While many US defense experts are looking at a conventional escalations ladder and off-ramps, IRGC-QF chief Qasim Soleimani has a history of thinking outside of Washington’s idea of the box. Soleimani could see weakness in President Trump’s responses towards Iran and in northeast Syria and could gamble on delivering control of Baghdad into Tehran’s hands.
For example, Iran could decide to force Abdul-Mahdi to remain in office, but place him under house arrest and use Iranian-backed militias to control access to him. Physical control over Abdul-Mahdi could allow the Iranians to pull the plug on Iraqi authorization for a continued US military presence in Iraq.
It is inconceivable that Abdul-Mahdi, who has tried to stay friends with the United States and Iran, would willingly go along with such a plan, but Iran’s Iraqi supporters control the PMF, and they have the power to pull this off, at least initially.
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A second option would be a riskier but straightforward Iranian-backed militia coup, in which Kataib Hizballah and other Iranian-backed militias seize control of government institutions, arrest and execute key Iraqi political and military leaders opposed to their power, and force others to flee. Soleimani and his Iraqi proxies would be gambling that President Trump does not have the stomach to order the several thousand US military forces in Iraq to fight against them or to order an invasion to liberate Iraq from Iranian domination.
A third option, probably in conjunction with the second, would use the Iranian-backed PMF units to stage a Tiananmen Square-style massacre of the anti-Iranian protesters in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square. More than 400 Iraqi protesters have already been killed by Iraq’s security services.
There are dozens of ways these options could go wrong for Soleimani or the United States. No one knows what, if anything, the regular Iraqi military would do, nor the marja’iyya religious leadership in Najaf, nor whether the United States military would launch a risky Noncombatant Evacuation Operation (NEO) to extract the thousands of American civilians in central and southern Iraq. But Soleimani may calculate that an Iranian victory that leads to a humiliating US withdrawal and the death or exile of the United States’ remaining Iraqi friends would leave the Islamic Republic of Iran more secure than at any time in Iran’s post-Revolutionary history.
The United States needs to undertake serious planning on how to prevent these “black swan” scenarios from occurring. In more normal times, the best course would be resolute unity and steadfastness from the United States and its Western allies to rein in Iranian adventurism. Unfortunately, for all concerned, these are not normal times.
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Kathie Fleck
Guest Spot
Kathie Fleck is an expert in crisis and political communications as a public relations practitioner and faculty member. She was a deputy press secretary for Ohio Governor George V. Voinovich and served as communication director for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. She curently is assistant professor of public relations at Ohio Northern University.
