At present, every country in the world is over-governed.

The Covid pandemic made it easy for governments to impose authoritarian rules on entire populations.

Seth J. Frantzman raises the question whether governments are necessary in an article at Middle East Forum, which we quote in part.

It is about Iraq, which seems to be functioning well enough without a central governing authority.

Iraq’s non-leader Muqtada al-Sadr, who usually makes headlines for being unwilling to take charge of anything despite having the support of millions of Iraqis, withdrew his party’s 73 parliamentarians, making it harder for Iraq to form a government.

The miracle of Iraq is that, after years of political chaos, it continues to function despite having no real leaders.

At first glance, Iraq might be considered one of the first post-states, proof that people can live without governments. However, this assessment breaks down upon recognition that the country has been taken over, at least in part, by Iran in the center and south, and by Turkey in parts of the north.

Between these two powerful neighbors there are other governments, including the wealthy, stable, and relatively powerful Kurdistan autonomous region. There is also the Iranian-backed Hashd al-Shaabi, the system of militias that run parts of Iraq. And there is a competent counter-terrorism force.

A competent counter-terrorism force! In the same country where Iran rules in the center and south, forcing its will on the population with a “system of militias”!

Still, Iraq is something of a miracle because it has gone from once being a stable and wealthy state governed by the genocidal maniac Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, to living under sanctions in the 1990s, to the US invasion of 2003, to the chaos of insurgency and then ISIS genocide in 2014, and now non-leadership.

Frantzman provides a description of governmental confusion worse confounded. The central government is dissolving away.

The Kurds are threatening to withdraw from the political process and return to undeclared independence.

The clash with the Kurds over the management of the oil fields in northern Iraq has become a constitutional clash. This prompted the Kurdish leaders to suggest that they would be the first to leave the political process, unless their demands regarding the independence of Kurdistan’s oil wealth from the authority of the center were met.

So Al-Sadr found all options closed. He couldn’t get Kurdish parties on board; he didn’t have Iran’s backing.

Yet, Frantzman repeats, the country continues to remain relatively stable despite the absence of any real leaders.

Which prompts the question: could a country be well managed, could freedom be reliably protected, if there were only local councils to make laws, and a central office of co-ordination?

A passionate supporter of Hamas and fierce hater of Israel, Robert Malley, has been appointed by Obama to be his chief adviser on policy towards ISIS.

He is of Syrian descent. His Egyptian-born father, an ardent Stalinist, was expelled from France for nefarious political activity.

J. E. Dyer writes at Liberty Unyielding:

The POTUS-in-Chief is taking it to the “Islamic State” in Paris this week, delivering blow after blow with his climate-summit rhetoric …

Has a bloodthirsty, Islamofascist guerrilla-terrorist movement ever been driven so thoroughly onto the ropes?  You decide.

But Obama’s not stopping there. His administration announced today that it’s appointing a new senior advisor to the president on ISIS. …

Rob Malley [was] the foreign affairs activist – formerly a regional director with the International Crisis Group – who was abruptly dropped from the Obama campaign organization in 2008 when his contacts with the terrorist group Hamas were revealed by British media.

Malley is a fan of talking with terrorists …

His father, a founder of the Egyptian Communist Party who had the distinction of being expelled from exile in France for his communist activities in the 1970s, nursed a long association with Yassir Arafat, among other ideological radicals of the time.

Alex Safian put it this way in his CAMERA profile of [Rob] Malley in 2008:

The world in which Robert Malley grew up was one in which Yasir Arafat, Fidel Castro, Leonid Brezhnev and Todor Zhivkov [Communist dictator of Bulgaria 1954-1989] were heroes, any American leader – even Jimmy Carter! – was villainous, and Israeli leaders were veritable demons.

Malley was at Harvard Law School when Obama was, and shares the same worldview. Malley’s ridiculous unsuitability for a major post with a mainline party candidate was obvious in 2008 – which is certainly an interesting point, since his background and views are so in sync with Obama’s.

But a few years later, after the 2012 election, Malley was quietly put on the National Security Council, as senior director for Iran, Iraq, Syria, and the Gulf States.  Early in 2015, Malley was moved up to the NSC position of Middle East Coordinator, a promotion that sparked serious concern from many observers.

In his new role at the NSC, Malley put his stamp on the negotiations with Iran in 2015.  (In fact, we are advised that he participated in the celebratory toast, with a bottle of fine Madeira donated from Portugal, enjoyed by lead negotiators John Kerry and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. Take that, ISIS!)

So, basically, Malley has been closely embedded, at the apex of influence, in the great security policy catastrophes of the Obama administration involving Syria, Iraq, and Iran.  Just take a moment and think how that’s been going for us on his watch – including the feature of ISIS’s meteoric rise during this period.

Malley favors talking to terrorists, and has urged the world to do just that with the homicidal baby-killers of Hamas.  As a bonus, he made contacts with Hamas himself, something that you would still be under hostile surveillance for by U.S. agencies, if you had done it.

And now he’s going to be Obama’s top advisor on ISIS.  Yay!

A correspondent suggested to me earlier today that it would be a waste of time for Malley to persuade Obama to cooperate with Iran and Hamas against ISIS, because we’re already doing that.

But why think small?  Mark my words.  Robert Malley’s distinctive approach will be cooperating with ISIS.  Hey, terrorists have grievances, and what they really need is an invitation to sit down and talk.

It’s the left upper-cut, from out of nowhere.  ISIS will never see it coming.

For more about our man with ISIS, this is from Discover the Networks:

Robert Malley was born in 1963 and lived in France from 1969-80. His mother — a native New Yorker — worked for the United Nations delegation of the National Liberation Front, the leftist, anti-American political party that led the independence movement in Algeria in the 1950s and early ’60s. Robert’s father, the late Simon Malley, was a key figure in the Egyptian Communist Party. The elder Malley was bitterly anti-Israel; a confidante of PLO leaderYasser Arafat; an inveterate critic of “Western imperialism”; a supporter of various leftist revolutionary “liberation movements,” particularly the Palestinian cause; a beneficiary of Soviet funding; and a backer of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. …

[He attended] Harvard Law School … at the same time as Barack Obama. And in 1991–92, Malley clerked for Supreme Court Justice Byron White.

After his clerkship, Malley became a Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where hepublished The Call From Algeria: Third Worldism, Revolution, and the Turn to Islam — a book that charts Algeria’s political evolution beginning from the turn of the 20th century.

Malley subsequently served as the U.S. National Security Council’s Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and Humanitarian Affairs from 1994-96; National Security Advisor Sandy Berger’s executive assistant from 1996-98; and President Bill Clinton’s Special Assistant for Arab-Israeli Affairs from 1998-2001. In July 2000 he was a member of the U.S. peace team that participated in the Camp David Summit between Bill Clinton (who brokered the talks), Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. The talks ended without an agreement.

Since 2001, Malley has written several controversial articles — some co-authored with Hussein Agha, a former advisor to Arafat — blaming Israel and exonerating Arafat for the failure at Camp David. For instance, in a July 2001 op-ed (titled Fictions About the Failure at Camp David) which was published in the New York Times, Malley alleged that Israeli — not Palestinian — inflexibility had caused the previous year’s peace talks to fail.

In an August 9, 2001 piece, Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors, Malley and Agha again dismissed claims that the Camp David talks had failed when “Ehud Barak’s unprecedented offer” was met with “Yasser Arafat’s uncompromising no”. Rather, they wrote that Barak had taken an unnecessarily hard-line approach in negotiating with Arafat. According to the authors, Arafat believed that Barak was intent on “either forcing him to swallow an unconscionable deal or mobilizing the world to isolate and weaken the Palestinians if they refused to yield”.

Malley’s identification of Israel as the cause of the Camp David failure has been widely embraced by Palestinian and Arab activists around the world, by Holocaust deniers … and by anti-Israel publications …

Malley’s account of the Camp David negotiations is entirely inconsistent with the recollections of the key figures who participated in those talks, most notably then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, U.S. President Bill Clinton, and U.S. Ambassador Dennis Ross (Clinton’s Middle East envoy). According to Ross, the peace efforts failed for one reason only: because Arafat wanted them to fail. “[F]undamentally,” said Ross, “I do not believe he [Arafat] can end the conflict. We had one critical clause in this agreement, and that clause was, this is the end of the conflict. Arafat’s whole life has been governed by struggle and a cause … [F]or him to end the conflict is to end himself…. Barak was able to reposition Israel internationally. Israel was seen as having demonstrated unmistakably it wanted peace, and the reason it [peace] wasn’t … achievable was because Arafat wouldn’t accept.”

Ed Lasky [at American Thinker] enumerates and summarizes some additional Malley op-eds condemning Israel, urging the U.S. to disengage somewhat from the Jewish state, and recommending that America reach out to negotiate with its traditional Arab enemies such as Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Muqtada al-Sadr [leader of the Shi’ite Mahdi Army in Iraq] …

Ten examples are given, all demonstrating ardent support for the Syrian tyrant and the terrorist organizations, and intense hostility to Israel.

In February 2004, Malley testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and recommended that the Arab-Israeli “Road Map for Peace” be abandoned because neither side had confidence that the other was bargaining in good faith. As Ed Lasky writes, “[Malley] advocated that a comprehensive settlement plan be imposed on the parties with the backing of the international community, including Arab and Moslem states. He anticipated that Israel would object with ‘cries of unfair treatment’ but counseled the plan be put in place regardless of such objections; he also suggested that waiting for a ‘reliable Palestinian partner’ was unnecessary.”

In July 2006 Malley criticized the U.S. for allegedly remaining “on the sidelines” and being a “no-show” in the overall effort to bring peace to the nations of the Middle East. Exhorting the Bush administration to change its policy of refusing to engage diplomatically with terrorists and their sponsoring states, Malley stated: “Today the U.S. does not talk to Iran, Syria, Hamas, the elected Palestinian government or Hizballah. … The result has been a policy with all the appeal of a moral principle and all the effectiveness of a tired harangue.”

In 2007, Malley became a foreign policy advisor to Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama.

In January 2008, Ed Lasky observed that Malley’s overarching political objectives included “a radical reshaping of decades of American foreign policy and a shredding of the role of morality in the formulation of American policy.” “These policies,” said Lasky, “would strengthen our enemies, empower dictatorships, and harm our allies.”

That same month, one U.S. security official … stated that Malley “has expressed sympathy to Hamas and Hezbollah and [has] offered accounts of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that don’t jibe with the facts.”

At that time, Malley was the Middle East and North Africa Program Director for theInternational Crisis Group (ICG), which receives funding from the Open Society Institute(whose founder, George Soros, serves on the ICG Board and Executive Committee). …

On May 9, 2008, the Barack Obama presidential campaign was forced to sever its ties with Malley after the latter told the Times of London that he had been in regular contact with Hamas as part of his work for ICG.

But that was what Obama liked about him.

On November 5, 2008, Middle East Newsline reported that Obama “had sent senior foreign-policy advisor Robert Malley to Egypt and Syria over the last few weeks to outline the Democratic candidate’s policy on the Middle East.” The report added that Malley had “relayed a pledge from Obama that the United States would seek to enhance relations with Cairo as well as reconcile with Damascus”.

“The tenor of the messages was that the Obama administration would take into greater account Egyptian and Syrian interests,” said an aide to Malley.

After President Obama’s 2012 re-election, he appointed Malley to serve as his senior advisor for Iraq-Iran-Syria and the Gulf states. Obama pledged, however, that Malley would have no involvement in issues related to Israel and the Palestinians.

On February 18, 2014, it was announced that Malley was formally returning to the White House to serve as a senior director at the National Security Council (NSC), where he would be in charge of managing relations between the United States and its allies in the Persian Gulf. In March 2015, Obama appointed Malley to direct the NSC’s policy in relation to the entire Middle East, including Israel.

With this man carrying out – and no doubt strongly reinforcing – Obama’s will, US policy in the Middle East has resulted in a vast conflagration.

With the same man “fixing” US relations with ISIS, what fresh hell will soon be breaking out?