Qatar rift splits Gulf partners; London terror; Mattis pleads with US allies; A virtual border wall? And just a bit more...
Different reactions to terrorism in London. Terrorists killed seven people in central London on Saturday night by driving a van into pedestrians on London Bridge, then leaping out and stabbing others with knives. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack. The perpetrators, who were wearing fake suicide vests, were shot dead by police eight minutes after someone placed the first call for help, the BBC reported.
Otso Iho, a senior analyst with Janes: “The attack marked the third major Islamist militant attack in the UK in less than three months, after a vehicle-impact attack and knife attack in Westminster on 22 March and a suicide improvised explosive device (IED) attack in Manchester on 22 May. The three attacks resulted in a total of 34 fatalities and more than 200 wounded.”
Here’s a timeline of terror attacks in Western Europe since 2015, from the New York Times.
UK Prime Minister Theresa May used the moment to push her proposals to further “regulate the internet” in order to deprive violent people and groups “online safe spaces.” Last year, May led the passage of Britain’s Investigatory Powers Act, which Fortune called “one of the world’s most draconian mass data collection and surveillance laws...In essence, the new law forces ISPs and phone companies to store — en masse — everyone’s communications data for 12 months and give the security services and police unfettered access to it.”
And President Trump took to Twitter, issuing a series of tweets that ran from declaring solidarity with the British people to blasting U.S. courts for finding fault with his “TRAVEL BAN” to castigating the Mayor of London for urging calm. “Along the way, he mischaracterized the mayor’s position, renewed a trans-Atlantic feud stretching back a year and widened his rift with the United States’ traditional European allies a bit further,” the New York Times reports.
From Defense One
Devin Nunes Dives Back into the Russia Investigation // Russell Berman: The California Republican supposedly stepped aside from the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation. But on Wednesday, he used his power as chairman to issue subpoenas related to the inquiry.
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Fast-moving developments in the Middle East leave a key U.S. ally ostracized and slide a vital air base under the microscope. In a 30-minute span on Sunday evening, Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE suspended diplomatic ties and blocked air and sea travel to and from Qatar—home to Al Udeid Air Base and the Combined Air Operations Center, “the U.S. military nerve center in Qatar used to manage air operations,” in particular, against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.
Worth noting, too, that Bahrain is the home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet, where three naval task forces operate with sailors from 31 nations—including Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE (but not Qatar or Egypt)—as well as the forward element of U.S. Central Command.
U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis, standing beside State Secretary Rex Tillerson, told reporters in Sydney this morning, “I am confident there will be no implications” for the ISIS war. Though there are already some implications for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, as Riyadh pulled all Qatari troops (roughly 1,000) from the battlefield there, al-Jazeera reported Sunday.
New U.S. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson this morning called the row with Qatar "largely a diplomatic issue. It hasn't changed our operations at all at al Udeid." Read more dispatches from her discussion this morning with the Air Force Association, via Defense One’s Marcus Weisgerber, who followed along on Twitter, here.
The U.S. is apparently on board with the actions taken by Qatar’s antagonists, too, noted Black Hounshell of Politico. His jump: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s remarks beside Mattis from Sydney: “I think what we’re witnessing is a growing list of irritants in the region that have been there for some time, and obviously they have now bubbled up to level that countries decided they needed to take action in an effort to have those differences addressed. We certainly would encourage the parties to sit down together and address these differences.”
At the heart of all the latest Middle East drama: “a sustained media onslaught that has again cast Qatar as a threat to stability and security in the Persian Gulf,” the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog reported Sunday evening—in particular, “incendiary comments attributed to Qatar’s Emir Tamim at a military graduation ceremony May 23.”
But those incendiary comments were published in a report “on the Qatar News Agency (QNA) website later that day [and further] alleged that the emir stated that Qatar had a tense relationship with President Trump’s administration, described Hamas as ‘the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,’ and called Iran ‘a big power in the stabilization of the region.’”
A day later, “the government communications office claimed...that the QNA website had been hacked and false statements posted on it.”
Adds the Post, “Regardless of whether they were made or fabricated — and people present at the military graduation insist that the emir made no speech whatsoever — Tamim’s remarks caused immediate uproar in regional media, much of it based in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.”
The result was almost a week of new articles published on the topic that took “the emir’s speech as fact and proceeded, on that basis, to accuse Qatar of being the weak link in the threat to regional stability from Iran and terrorism — and to demand that Qatar choose sides between the GCC and Iran.”
BLUF: “The ferocity and the sheer scale of the ‘Qatar-bashing’ articles suggest that an orchestrated campaign is underway to discredit Doha regionally but also — crucially — in the eyes of the Trump administration.”
Qatar’s reax: The diplomatic moves are “unjustified” and “based on claims and allegations that have no basis in fact.”
The reaction from Iran: "What is happening is the preliminary result of the sword dance," Hamid Aboutalebi, deputy chief of staff of Iran's President Hassan Rouhani, tweeted in a reference to Trump's recent visit to Saudi Arabia. That, via Reuters, here.
For some perspective, the New York Times notes that “There have long been fissures between Qatar and other Sunni Arab nations. Qatar, for example, provided financial support to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which led the former government in Egypt and opposed the Egyptian military’s takeover as an illegal ‘coup.’ Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E., which consider the Muslim Brotherhood a threat to stability to the region, supported the Egyptian military’s takeover.”
The more immediate problem now for Washington: the row “threatens to complicate the Trump administration’s effort to mobilize coalitions against Iran and terrorist groups in the Middle East.” A tiny bit more from the Times, here.
The view from here: “For months, we’ve been wondering, ‘What happens when Trump faces a [foreign policy] crisis not of his own making?’ We may be about to find out,” warned Max Fisher of the New York Times.
Trump says he’s picked a Navy secretary, again. On Friday, the president said he would nominate Richard V. Spencer, an investment banker and former Marine aviator “with longstanding ties to the Pentagon and U.S. think tanks, to be secretary of the Navy,” the Wall Street Journal reports (paywall). Spencer’s name was floated for the job in March, after Trump’s first pick withdrew rather than make the divestments necessary to avoid potential conflicts of interest. (Read that March story, from USNI News, here.)
If nominated and confirmed, Spencer would be the sixth appointee in the Trump administration’s Defense Department. Currently, 48 senior jobs remain unfilled.
Mattis’s advice to America’s allies: “Bear with us.” Those remarks come from the SecDef’s visit to Singapore late last week. Mattis took a congratulatory line toward China and the pressure it is placing on North Korea; but he strayed from that cordial approach when the topic switched to China’s ongoing artificial island development in the South China Sea.
“As far as the rules-based order, you know, obviously we have a new president in Washington, D.C. We’re all aware of that. And there is going to be fresh approaches taken,” the defense secretary said.
The Guardian writes that Mattis “acknowledge[d] a historical ‘reluctance’ among Americans to engage with the world.”
“The 20th century took us out of that,” Mattis said. “What a crummy world if we all retreat inside our own borders. How many people deprived of good lives during the Depression? How many tens of millions of people killed in WWII? Like it or not, we’re part of the world...Bear with us,” he said before going to paraphrase a quote from Winston Churchill: “Once we’ve exhausted all possible alternatives, the Americans will do the right thing.” More on all that, here.
Oculus Rift founder pitches a virtual border wall. The man: Palmer Freeman Luckey. “When he was just 21, he made an overnight fortune selling his start-up, a company called Oculus VR that made virtual-reality gear, to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014,” the New York Times reports. Now, “he has a new start-up in the works, a company that is developing surveillance technology that could be deployed on borders between countries and around military bases, according to three people familiar with the plan who asked for anonymity because it’s still confidential. They said the investment fund run by Peter Thiel, a technology adviser to Mr. Trump, planned to support the effort.”
Said Luckey to the Times: “We need a new kind of defense company, one that will save taxpayer dollars while creating superior technology to keep our troops and citizens safer.”
So, what about this system? “As [Luckey] he sees it, according to those familiar with the plan, the technology can be used for many kinds of perimeter security, including military bases and stadium events, where it could be used to detect drones. Software would help the system figure out which objects to ignore, like birds and coyotes. Those familiar with the plan say Mr. Luckey believes his system, which can be mounted on telephone poles, can be built far more cost effectively than Mr. Trump’s proposed wall on the Mexican border — and with fewer obstacles from landowners.” Read the rest, here.
President Trump’s support is declining in military communities, a new poll shows. “An analysis of Gallup polling data comparing the first 100 days of Trump's presidency to the month of May shows that Trump's job approval in military counties dropped sharply in the last month — from an average 51 percent approval and 41 percent disapproval in the first 100 days to 43 percent approval and 52 percent disapproval for May,” NBC News reported this weekend.
Some possible factors for the drop: “the Russia/Trump campaign investigation news that dominated the month, from the firing of former FBI Director James Comey to the naming of a special counsel, and the president's often-antagonistic relationship with intelligence services may have played a role. And the president's proposed budget calls for another round of base closures — something likely to be unpopular with the communities that serve the military.”
Worth noting, NBC writes, that “these communities have long been Republican and demographically speaking they still look like Republicans. They are slightly less diverse than the nation as a whole, 66 percent non-Hispanic white (versus 63 percent nationally).” Read the rest, here.
Lastly today: A #LongRead on the Mosul offensive. Buzzfeed’s Mike Giglio and photographer Warzer Jaff are back in Iraq to report from the wildly deadly front lines of the fight against ISIS in northern Iraq. His focus: the “Golden Knights” of Iraq’s Counter Terrorism Service. They’ve taken the brunt of the fighting in Iraq’s second-largest city since the operation kicked off in mid-October.
This is one of those stories that’s too well-told to pull out excerpts. So bookmark the page for some lunch reading—warning: the story has more than a few graphic moments—over, here.