The Atlantic: Al-Qaeda Has Rebuilt Itself—With Iran's Help

Our research reveals that al-Qaeda and covert agents acting for the Iranian deep state first attempted to broker an unlikely agreement more than two decades back, after Saddam Hussein flat-out rejected al-Qaeda’s request for military assistance. The pact then flourished under the George W. Bush administration, when a back-channel from the White House to Tehran, running from 2001 to 2003, discussed it frequently. Former State Department and White House officials in on these talks maintain that the vice president’s office suggested the White House do nothing, worrying that the administration would undermine the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein in Iraq—which was being underwritten by claims he sponsored al-Qaeda and concealed weapons of mass destruction. Finally, according to these same sources, the vice president’s office also told U.S. envoys to Iran and Afghanistan that once regime change had succeeded in Iraq, Tehran was next. [...]

There is no evidence that this 1995 pact came to anything. But a door was opened, and on December 20, 2001 when Mahfouz reached the Taftan border crossing and made a dash into Iran, he was greeted on the Iranian side by agents from the Ansar ul-Mahdi Corps, an elite cell within the Quds Force; he eventually won an audience in Tehran with its commander, General Qassem Soleimani. However, Iran was not yet fully committed to cooperating. According to senior U.S officials then working on South Asia and Afghanistan for the State Department and the White House, Iran’s Foreign Ministry, fearful that the U.S. would turn its military attentions to Iran after it finished the invasion of Iraq for which it was then building international support, reached out to the Americans. [...]

Hamza would remain with his father for a little over 12 hours. Bin Laden, spooked, forced him to leave, only for the SEAL team to arrive shortly afterward. A contingent of al-Qaeda’s clerical and military leaders remained in Iran until April 2012, when Mahfouz also slipped away from his Quds Force guard, and eventually flew home to Mauritania. Most of the outfit’s military council, a core group of five led by the Egyptian Saif al Adel, remained in Iran until 2015. Then the Quds Force transported some to Syria to join the fight against the Islamic State. Leading this cell was Abu al-Khayr al-Masri and Abu Mohammed al-Masri—the latter Hamza’s father-in-law, described by the U.S. intelligence community as the “most experienced and capable operational planner not in U.S. or allied custody.” With them came Jordanian fighters with connections to Zarqar, including one of Zarqawi’s most important deputies—the plan being for this group to contact ISIS fighters and leaders, encouraging a split.

read the article

The New York Review of Books: Year One: The Mad King

He laid out the clear and present danger posed by Trump. “He creates scapegoats of Muslims and Mexican immigrants. He calls for the use of torture. He calls for killing the innocent children and family members of terrorists. He cheers assaults on protesters. He applauds the prospect of twisting the Constitution to limit First Amendment freedom of the press. This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss.” [...]

Like so many of his fellow Republicans, Romney would eventually make his peace with Trump, even entertaining over a dinner of frogs’ legs the possibility of becoming his secretary of state. Nearly a year after Trump’s election, congressional Republicans and the president find themselves locked in a relationship of morbid co-dependency, but it is not one based on misunderstanding. There was no mystery, no hidden knowledge, about who or what Donald Trump was, or what it would mean to invest him with the royal purple of the presidency. Republicans gave it to him knowingly. [...]

Even as Robert Mueller’s investigation accelerates, there are few signs that the party has any will to resist him. In the last year and a half, Trump has succeeded in moving the window of acceptability in our politics, especially on the right. The collaborators rationalize their response thus: if they did not go along, then power would shift to even worse actors. As the former presidential aide Steve Bannon plots a populist revanchist rebellion, some Republicans tell themselves that it is better to be a Vichy Republican, a quiescent enabler, than one of the denizens of Bannon’s Crazytown.  

read the article

CityLab: A Duplex of London's Public Housing Will Become a Museum Exhibit

Lovers of both social housing and 20th-century architecture have been fretting about the fate of East London’s Robin Hood Gardens for years. A public housing project and Brutalist icon completed in 1972, the estate (as projects are called in the U.K.) has been run-down and facing demolition for some time, targeted by a local borough that wants to replace it with denser, more profitable housing. [...]

It’s going to be scraped off the building’s carcass and preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum, Britain’s national art and design collection, where it will go on display in the public galleries (possibly in an East London branch that’s due to open in 2021). A remnant of Britain’s great 20th century social housing experiment will end up not as somewhere to live, but as a museum exhibit.

The move isn’t entirely unprecedented. The V&A, as the museum is known in London, already displays the carved wooden façade of a 1599 London merchant’s house. The symbolism is nonetheless striking. After decades of neglect, a building designed to give better conditions to low-income Londoners will be gutted, its concrete trimmings preserved as a design artifact. Free to admire for its clean lines and rough textures, the building will be presented for aesthetic enjoyment after having been safely gelded of its social purpose. Given the estate’s name and the general social profile of London museum-goers, it’s hard not to notice the irony: The building is being taken from the poor and given to the rich. [...]

That ethos is now as dead as any fossil. London’s housing projects are increasingly being redeveloped with more private housing, typically displacing many residents (despite prior assurances to the contrary) in the process. Robin Hood Gardens is being cleared away for a new development that could still rehouse the residents left on the estate after decades of tenancy attrition—even though boroughs across London have an appalling record at keeping promises to rehouse residents of redeveloped projects. Half of the new homes built on the site will be for private sale, with most of them costing over $700,000.

read the article

The New York Times: Understanding North Korea's Mountains

Political Critique: Back in the USSR? 100th anniversary of the October Revolution in Belarus

During the first years of independence, adherence to the Soviet past and ideology legitimized President Alexander Lukashenko. The socialistic (or pseudo-socialistic) rhetoric of socially oriented market economy, the viability of the revolution’s ideas, limited entrepreneurship, strong state patronage, etc. dominated the Belarusian political life and public opinion. However, quasi-implementation of these ideas required permanent financial allocations which the“socially oriented” and planned Belarusian economy could not generate. When allocations were coming from Russia, everybody was satisfied, including ordinary Belarusians who received their 500 USD salaries and enjoyed state subsidies, as well as Belarusian elites who were able to develop businesses extracting Russian resources and syphoning public funds. [...]

Firstly, after the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis,  Belarusian authorities emphasized a national – Belarusian – identity. While the Ukrainian crisis was not the only reason for this change, it definitely intensified the process. Similarly the October Revolution stopped being the only source of the Belarusian statehood and independence with links to the Principalities of Polotsk and Turov, as well as to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania coming into the official discourse. [...]

Socialist rhetoric is also disappearing: salaries are lower and prices higher than in Poland, Lithuania or Ukraine. The last ramparts of socialism – low transport and housing fares, as well as pseudo-free education and medical treatment rest on the chopping block.

read the article

Politico: European Commission aims to lift roadblocks for military

In a communication published Friday, the Commission announced an action plan “to facilitate and help to expedite military mobility,” which effectively amounted to a pre-emptive strike by the Commission ahead of a meeting of defense ministers at the Council on Monday, where they are to officially sign on to a new military cooperation initiative. [...]

The Commission’s move, while acknowledging national sovereignty over troop movements, nonetheless puts pressure on EU defense ministers to prioritize mobility in their new cooperation venture, and on NATO to explain why obstacles remain despite years of discussions about eliminating them, particularly in the face of new security threats from Russia. [...]

Key will be finding cash to buttress roads and bridges around the bloc to make sure they can bear the weight of tanks and heavy machinery. A commitment by NATO allies to increase spending will likely help on that front. Infrastructure is especially creaky in the east, and agreeing to invest could help some meet their 2 percent NATO defense spending target.  

read the article

Vox: “Spiritual but not religious”: inside America's rapidly growing faith group

The survey, which profiled about 2,000 American adults in the early months of 2017, found that 18 percent of Americans identify as spiritual but not religious. (By contrast, 31 percent of Americans identify as neither spiritual nor religious.) They tend to skew younger and more educated than religious Americans, with 40 percent holding at least a four-year college degree and 17 percent having some form of postgraduate education. They’re also far more politically liberal than their religious counterparts: 40 percent identify as liberal, compared to 24 percent of the population overall and 27 percent of Americans that are neither spiritual nor religious. [...]

The study found that many “spiritual but not religious” Americans maintain a connection to some sort of organized faith tradition, even if they do not practice it regularly. Just three in 10 religiously unaffiliated Americans ranked as spiritual but not religious, suggesting that most spiritual-but-not-religious Americans maintain links with a more formal religious identity; the largest groups of these identify as mainline Protestant (18 percent) or Catholic (18 percent). [...]

One thing many of my interview subjects had in common, though, was a desire for community, one thing their more solitary ritual practices hadn’t been able to give them. Most said that community was something they missed, and many reported fond memories of a communal aspect to their childhood religions. “I don't tend to like uniformity of practice and belief because that gets a bit culty to me,” said Ribar. “It often means people stop asking questions — that's why I'm shy of organized spiritual community. But I do sometimes long for more people to share things with.”

read the article