How Long Shall Fire Remain Ceased?

Everyone is sitting and waiting to see if there’ll be an extension of the cease-fire beyond tomorrow evening… given that the first cease-fire included little actual negotiation I’m not sure we’ll know until we’re right on top of the deadline. In the meantime, the answer to the question “what are Iran’s militias up to?” is “quietly fighting a war against the Gulf Monarchies:“

Iraqi militias backed by Iran launched dozens of explosive drones at Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states during more than five weeks of fighting, in what is becoming a shadowy war within a war pushing some of the world’s largest oil producers toward open conflict.

According to at least one Saudi assessment described by a person familiar with it, up to half of the nearly 1,000 drone attacks on the kingdom came from inside Iraq. They included strikes on a Saudi refinery in the sensitive Yanbu oil hub on the Red Sea and oil fields in the kingdom’s Eastern Province, people familiar with the matter said. 

Drones launched from Iraq targeted Kuwait’s only civilian airport. They also targeted Bahrain after President Trump announced a cease-fire earlier this month, some of the people said. Militias went after Gulf assets inside Iraq as well, including the Kuwaiti consulate in Basra and the United Arab Emirates’s consulate in Kurdistan.

Some other links for your morning reading:

• Nice discussion of the lowkey naval arms race between access and anti-access technologies…
• Geopolitics make for strange bedfellows, as in some sense all of Israel, Russia, the US and Iran are part of the Coalition of Tradition, which is to say the Transnational Right…
• Pakistan has managed some adroit diplomacy over the past 18 months, whether or not it manages to broker a peace between Washington and Tehran.
• The Iran War has largely been Good for the F-35, but it has also indicated some flaws in performance and in employment strategy.
• The lecture that Kori Schake was asked not to give to the Air War College.
• The Strait of Hormuz and the limits of maritime law.