World roundup: June 8-9 2024
Stories from Iran, Sudan, France, and elsewhere
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THIS WEEKEND IN HISTORY
June 8, 218: In a battle near Antioch, a rebel army supporting 14 year old imperial claimant Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus defeats an army under Roman Emperor Marcus Opellius Macrinus. After his defeat, Macrinus attempted to flee west but was captured at Chalcedon and later executed. The new emperor, who took the regal name Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus, was later dubbed “Elagabalus” because he had previously been a priest of the Syrian sun god Elagabalus. He established that deity as the chief god of the Roman pantheon, displacing Jupiter. Elagabalus is known today mostly for lurid and probably sensationalized accounts of the decadence of his court and of his sexual and romantic relationships. The Praetorian Guard assassinated him in 222 and elevated his cousin Severus Alexander to replace him.
June 8, 1941: World War II’s Operation Exporter begins.
June 9, 721: An Aquitanian army under Duke Odo of Aquitaine defeats an invading Arab army under the Umayyad governor of Andalus, al-Samh ibn Malik al-Khawlani, at the Battle of Toulouse. Odo’s relief army was able to sucker the Arabs away from their siege of the city through a feigned retreat before turning and virtually annihilating the invaders (Khawlani was among the dead). Though much less famous than the 732 Battle of Tours, which gets great press as the battle that Saved Christendom, Toulouse was arguably just as important. If Khawlani had been able to capture Toulouse he could have established it as a base for future campaigns against the Franks and Tours, or whatever battle wound up replacing it, might have gone much differently.
June 9, 1815: The Congress of Vienna, intended to sort out a new balance of power in Europe following the end of the French Revolution and the downfall of Napoleon, concludes with a “Final Act” establishing the terms of the new continental framework. Among other things, Vienna established the “Congress System” under which the five “Great Powers”—Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, and the United Kingdom—would manage European affairs, and also established the reactionary “Conservative Order” to tamp down revolutionary sentiment. The whole system fell apart under the pressures of nationalism and finally during the Revolutions of 1848, though parts of it were restored under the Concert of Europe system spearheaded by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The Israeli military (IDF) carried out (apparently with US assistance) what it described somewhat loosely as a “hostage rescue” operation in central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp on Saturday, successfully freeing four people who’d been taken captive on October 7. I say “somewhat loosely” because in the process of rescuing those four people the IDF killed at least 274 Palestinians and left nearly 700 more wounded according to Gaza’s health ministry, which leaves a very fine line between describing this as a “hostage rescue” and describing it as a “massacre.” Some portion of those casualties were presumably combatants, including people with direct responsibility for the abduction of those captives in the first place, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that many were civilians (for whatever it’s worth, Hamas is claiming that three of those killed were also hostages).
Readers are free to determine for themselves how they feel about a ratio of roughly 70 dead Palestinians per rescued hostage, but I will note that the initial international celebration of the release of those hostages has given way to an overall sense of unease if not outright condemnation over the level of casualties. That’s even been true within the Biden administration, which has gone from effusively praising the operation to at least acknowledging the scale of the toll (though it’s putting the onus for those casualties on Hamas). Given that the Israeli government’s insistence on continuing its Gaza operation (or, put another way, its insistence that the IDF be allowed to keep killing Palestinians) has been one of the primary obstacles to securing the release of all of the hostages through peaceful means I have a hard time crediting them with rescuing a handful of them ultra-violently.
Elsewhere:
Benjamin Netanyahu’s chief political rival/enabler, Benny Gantz, wound up postponing Saturday’s announcement that he’s quitting the Israeli “war cabinet” so as not to conflict with the hostage news. He announced it on Sunday instead. Gantz blamed Netanyahu for “preventing us from advancing toward true victory” in his remarks, referring particularly to the latter’s refusal to articulate any plan for Gaza’s future beyond indefinite violence. Gantz’s departure means nothing for Netanyahu’s governing coalition. The tenor of the reporting suggests we’re supposed to believe this will leave Netanyahu more beholden to the far right militant elements of that coalition, but I’m not sure how that would cause him to act any differently than he’s been acting since October 7, or really since he returned to office in December 2022. In announcing his departure, Gantz also called on Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant “to do the right thing,” which presumably means either leading some sort of revolt against Netanyahu from within the Likud Party or quitting the party and taking any Likud dissenters with him. Either of those steps actually could collapse the government, but there’s no indication Gallant is considering any such action.
The Joe Biden Memorial Pier officially resumed aid shipments on Saturday. I note this mostly because there have been rumors circulating predominantly on social media to the effect that the IDF used the JBMP to facilitate the Nuseirat attack. The US military has denied those allegations but the speculation alone may be enough to make the pier a potential target. I’ve also seen speculation that the IDF disguised its forces as aid workers to enable their entry into Nuseirat, which if true would be a war crime and would put actual aid workers at risk. But I have not seen any confirmation of that speculation.
If Joe Biden’s big ceasefire push wasn’t already on life support before Saturday’s raid then it certainly is now. The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that Biden had convinced the Egyptian and Qatari governments to threaten Hamas leaders with economic sanctions (including asset freezes), expulsion from Qatar, and even imprisonment if they don’t acquiesce to the proposal Biden announced a couple of weeks ago, but the threats only caused those Hamas officials to further entrench their demand for a definite end to the conflict, which the Israeli government is unwilling to grant. Back to the drawing board I guess.
The Colombian government is halting exports of coal to Israel, following an announcement to that effect by President Gustavo Petro on Saturday. This follows Petro’s decision to cut off diplomatic relations last month. Colombia exported some $320 million worth of coal to Israel over the first eight months of 2023, a fairly small amount compared with the $9 billion or so in coal that Colombia exports overall per year, so the impact on Colombia’s economy should be relatively minor. The impact on Israel might be a bit more significant, in that it currently imports most of its coal from Colombia, but I assume the Israeli government will find a replacement supplier or suppliers fairly readily.
SYRIA
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a car bomb killed two Iranian-aligned militia fighters in the eastern Syrian city of Deir Ezzor on Saturday. There’s no indication at this point as to responsibility.
LEBANON
IDF airstrikes killed at least two people in the southern Lebanese border village of Aitaroun on Saturday. One was a Hezbollah member but the other appears to have been a civilian. Those strikes also sparked new wildfires, which seems to be an increasingly common occurrence as Hezbollah and the IDF continue their tit-for-tat strikes.
SAUDI ARABIA
According to The Wall Street Journal, the Biden administration is “close to finalizing” a binding security alliance with Saudi Arabia. This is the same alliance that’s been on the table for months as part of a broader deal that would result in the normalization of Saudi-Israeli diplomatic relations. Standing in the way is the Israeli government’s refusal to commit to “a credible pathway toward a two-state solution with the Palestinians.” Apart from the Israeli elements the agreement, which is modeled on the US-Japan security treaty, would oblige the US to come to Saudi Arabia’s aid in the event that its security is threatened while giving the US access to the kingdom and its airspace for military purposes. It would also reportedly prohibit the kingdom from negotiating a similar arrangement with China.
IRAN
Iran’s Guardian Council has finished vetting candidates for the June 28 special election to replace former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, cutting 74 registrants and allowing six to proceed onto the ballot. The big news seems to be the council’s decision to disqualify former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, though this being the third time that’s happened I’m not sure it really qualifies as “big news” anymore. Of more interest is the fact that the council disqualified former parliament speaker Ali Larijani. This is the second time it’s done that, but there’s been considerable speculation that Larijani had received assurances directly from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that it wouldn’t happen this time around.
The two most familiar names to make the cut are current parliament speaker and perennial presidential candidate Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and former Supreme National Security Council secretary Saeed Jalili. Tehran Mayor Alireza Zakani is also on the ballot. Any of them would presumably be acceptable to the Iranian political establishment, though voters have had the chance to elect Qalibaf and Jalili on multiple occasions each and have decisively passed on them every time. Perhaps the most interesting candidate is former Health Minister Masoud Pezeshkian, if only because one would have assumed that his fairly reformist political bent would have gotten him disqualified. He’s likely there to provide the illusion of real choice, but if voters who are disenchanted with the Iranian government decide to vote rather than sit out the election he could become the beneficiary of their disenchantment.
ASIA
PAKISTAN
A roadside bomb struck a military truck in northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Sunday, killing at least seven soldiers. There’s been no claim of responsibility but given the location it’s highly likely the explosive was planted by the Pakistani Taliban or one of its offshoots.
INDIA
Kashmiri separatists are believed to have been responsible for an attack on a bus in India’s Jammu region on Sunday that left at least nine Hindu pilgrims dead. The attackers reportedly opened fire on a bus carrying the pilgrims to the Vaishno Devi Temple, killing some and sending the bus careening into a gorge. Many of the other passengers were injured in the incident.
NORTH KOREA
The North Korean government unleashed another wave of filth balloons on South Korea on Saturday, two days after a defector activist group in South Korea sent a number of propaganda-laden balloons north. In response, the South Korean government now says that it will resume “propaganda loudspeaker broadcasts” along the Demilitarized Zone, a practice that was halted in a now-suspended 2018 agreement between the two countries. The last time South Korea resumed those broadcasts after an extended pause, in 2015, the North Korean military responded by starting a small artillery exchange that, fortunately, caused no casualties and went no further than some mutual shelling.
AFRICA
SUDAN
The Rapid Support Forces group reportedly attacked the last fully functioning hospital in the besieged Sudanese city of El Fasher over the weekend, knocking it out of commission. El Fasher’s South Hospital has been on the brink of collapse for weeks now, owing to a combination of violence outside and a lack of supplies inside. This latest incident apparently involved shooting inside the facility itself, causing an unknown number of casualties. There is now no medical facility in El Fasher that is capable of taking in mass casualties, with the eventual RSF move against the city still to come.
CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC
Central African authorities on Saturday suspended the operations of a Chinese mining firm, Daqing SARL, accusing it of collaborating with “armed groups” and conducting illicit mining operations. It’s not entirely clear which “armed groups” are allegedly involved, but the company has been operating in the southern CAR town of Mingala, where the rebel Coalition of Patriots for Change group is active. It’s possible that the company was compelled to deal with the rebels for security reasons. Chinese firms have considerable mining interests in the CAR and those interests have come under rebel attack in the past.
SOMALIA
The Somali government says its security forces killed at least 47 al-Shabab fighters in a clash in central Somalia’s Galgadud region on Saturday. At least five Somali soldiers were also killed in the incident, after Somali authorities got word of a pending al-Shabab attack and were able to “ambush” the insurgents.
KENYA
Speaking of al-Shabab, it’s possible that its fighters were responsible for the murder of four construction workers in northern Kenya’s Garissa county on Friday. Al-Shabab has operated in Garissa in the past, partly in retaliation for Kenya’s support for the Somali government. Kenyan authorities say they’re looking into an unspecified “armed group” that had previously threatened to attack the construction site where the killings took place.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO
The Allied Democratic Forces militant group killed at least 41 people in attacks on three villages in the eastern DRC’s North Kivu province on Friday night. That brings the total number of people killed in various ADF attacks over the past week to more than 80. The rationale behind this flurry of violence is unclear.
EUROPE
EUROPEAN UNION
The main round of European parliamentary elections on Sunday indicate that far-right parties made significant gains, but not enough to win control of the legislature:
Early forecasts in the European Parliament elections on Sunday showed voters punishing ruling centrists and throwing support behind far-right parties, most notably in France, where disastrous results for French President Emmanuel Macron’s coalition prompted him to dissolve the National Assembly and call snap elections.
Although a combination of centrist, pro-European parties was projected to maintain a majority in the European Union’s law-approving body, far-right parties claimed the largest share of seats from some of Europe’s biggest countries, including France and Italy. Green parties across the European Union took a particular hit.
“The center is holding,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Sunday night. But the outcome, with gains for parties on the extremes, “comes with great responsibility for the parties in the center” to ensure “stability” and “a strong and effective Europe,” she said.
I don’t want to imbue these elections with more significance than they’re due, given the relative powerlessness of the European Parliament, but they are at the very least a barometer of European public opinion. And the French result was particularly noteworthy, but we’ll get to that below.
UKRAINE
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov claimed on Sunday that Russian forces, including his Akhmat unit, had captured a village along the Russian border in northeastern Ukraine’s Sumy oblast. There’s no confirmation of this and as far as I know there’s been no comment from either the Russian or Ukrainian governments. There are also reports that Russian forces have entered the town of Chasiv Yar, which is located west of Bakhmut in Ukraine’s Donetsk oblast, and may be in control of one of its districts. The Russian military has been targeting Chasiv Yar for months. The town is strategically positioned in an elevated area and gets the Russian military closer to the city of Kramatorsk.
BULGARIA
Sunday’s European elections coincided with Bulgaria’s latest general election, the country’s sixth in a bit over three years. Exit polling suggests that the ruling GERB-SDS party will “win” but will fall well shy of a majority in another largely fragmented parliament. If that holds up it means another potentially extended coalition negotiation followed by a potentially precarious coalition government…which may mean potentially another snap election in the near future.
FRANCE
As noted above, France’s EP election looks like it may have been a blowout for Marine Le Pen’s far right National Rally party, which according to the pollster Ipsos appears to have won with around 31.5 percent of the vote. That projects to be double the support for French President Emmanuel Macron’s coalition. Macron, again as noted above, has already dissolved parliament in a huff and has scheduled a snap election for June 30, with the second round on July 7. In effect he seems to be daring the French electorate to back Le Pen and her band of extremists in a vote that actually matters. If they take his dare, Macron’s legacy will be that he allowed the French far right to enter government.
BELGIUM
Sunday’s EP vote also coincided with Belgium’s federal election, which looks to have seen the right-wing Flemish nationalist New Flemish Alliance maintain its position as the largest party in parliament while the far-right Flemish nationalist Vlaams Belang party came in second. Both parties seem likely to increase the number of seats they control in the Chamber of Representatives. Even collectively they’re likely to be well short of a majority, which gives their opponents some chance to form another complicated multiparty coalition to keep them out of government, or at least to exclude Vlaams Belang. That’s what happened after Belgium’s 2019 election.
AMERICAS
UNITED STATES
Finally, amid reports that the Biden administration is considering turning its “modernization” of the US nuclear arsenal into an expansion of the US nuclear arsenal, TomDispatch’s William Astore makes the case for removing not one, but two legs of the sacred nuclear triad:
As a late-stage baby boomer, a child of the 1960s, I grew up dreaming about America’s nuclear triad. You may remember that it consisted of strategic bombers like the B-52 Stratofortress, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) like the Minuteman, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) like the Poseidon, all delivery systems for what we then called “the Bomb.” I took it for granted that we needed all three “legs” — yes, that was also the term of the time — of that triad to ward off the Soviet Union (aka the “evil empire”).
It took me some time to realize that the triad was anything but the trinity, that it was instead a product of historical contingency. Certainly, my mind was clouded because two legs of that triad were the prerogative of the U.S. Air Force, my chosen branch of service. When I was a teenager, the Air Force had 1,054 ICBMs (mainly Minutemen missiles) in silos in rural states like Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming, along with hundreds of strategic bombers kept on constant alert against the Soviet menace. They represented enormous power not just in destructive force measured in megatonnage but in budgetary authority for the Air Force. The final leg of that triad, the most “survivable” one in case of a nuclear war, was (and remains) the Navy’s SLBMs on nuclear submarines. (Back in the day, the Army was so jealous that it, too, tried to go atomic, but its nuclear artillery shells and tactical missiles were child’s play compared to the potentially holocaust-producing arsenals of the Air Force and Navy.)
When I said that the triad wasn’t the trinity, what I meant (the obvious aside) was this: the U.S. military no longer needs nuclear strategic bombers and land-based ICBMs in order to threaten to destroy the planet. As a retired Air Force officer who worked in Cheyenne Mountain, America’s nuclear redoubt, during the tail end of the first Cold War, and as a historian who once upon a time taught courses on the atomic bomb at the Air Force Academy, I have some knowledge and experience here. Those two “legs” of the nuclear triad, bombers and ICBMs, have long been redundant, obsolete, a total waste of taxpayer money — leaving aside, of course, that they would prove genocidal in an unprecedented fashion were they ever to be used.
Nevertheless, such thoughts have no effect on our military. Instead, the Air Force is pushing ahead with plans to field — yes! — a new strategic bomber, the B-21 Raider, and — yes, again! — a new ICBM, the Sentinel, whose combined price tag will likely exceed $500 billion. The first thing any sane commander-in-chief with an urge to help this country would do is cancel those new nuclear delivery systems tomorrow. Instead of rearming, America should begin disarming, but don’t hold your breath on that one.
So many different types of bad news.