Yearly Archives: 2014

Iraq’s Air Force: Incompetent or Intentionally Cruel?

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The main difference between the Syrian Air Force and the Iraqi Air Force seems at first glance to be intentionality versus pure incompetence. They’re using the same tactics, but the Syrian regime is obviously doing it on purpose, whereas the Iraqi government — one could argue — just can’t be bothered to be more careful and probably lacks the training to do so.

However, it doesn’t really matter about training (or intent) when the main problem is using exploding barrels instead of proper bombs. No guidance system, no guarantee of immediate explosion (i.e. ongoing risk), and they’ve been bombing areas that don’t even have ISIS fighters present. Recently, while resenting political heat from his erstwhile Western backers, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki openly praised the Syrian Air Force and the Syrian regime for its actions against ISIS.

The Human Rights Watch video below shows the aftermath — and presents eyewitness accounts — of barrel-bombing raids this past June on Fallujah, a western Iraqi city that was a hotbed of Sunni resistance after the U.S. invasion in 2003:

Screen Shot 2014-08-08 at 2.15.23 AM

 
Fallujah fell to ISIS, at least temporarily, as early as January of this year, and the Maliki government strongly hinted at the time that they blamed the residents for the city’s capture — and viewed them as collaborators against Baghdad. The city is now facing what amounts to collective punishment. But is this policy intentional or just really inept?

As I noted yesterday, even when the Iraqi Air Force attempts to hit actual ISIS targets — in the most recent case an ISIS-run court that was holding 50 prisoners, probably from the Iraqi military or anti-ISIS paramilitary forces — they are just appallingly awful at their jobs.

Iraqi airstrikes didn’t even make it past day 1 without indiscriminately obliterating big clusters of people who weren’t the intended target because the air force lacks the training — and desire — to be more careful or conscientious about their target selection. Killing 50 prisoners from your own side, while trying to liberate them by way of airstrikes, is not a smooth move.

 
That instance was probably an accident, even if an altogether unsurprising one. But the seemingly random aerial targeting of northern and western Sunni-majority cities and towns with crude and improvised bombs, throughout 2014 (even before the fall of Mosul to ISIS), seems to point to a much more serious total lack of regard for the lives of Iraq’s sectarian minorities by the Maliki government and perhaps even an active desire to do them harm.

A one-time accident would be one thing. Repeated attacks on populated areas, without real evidence of militant presence, and without any effort whatsoever to reduce casualties or even to use real munitions, suggests an intent to repay alleged rebellious behavior in-kind, just as the Alawite-run/Shia-supported dictatorship in neighboring Syria has done repeatedly throughout its civil war. Small wonder Maliki has such kind words for their model actions.

And that is exactly what many observers were trying to raise earlier this year about the heavy-handed and Shia-supremacist government he was running. The Iraqi government, as currently run and led, is its own biggest enemy. Without a major sea change, popular anger and resentment will continue to fuel disunity, separatism, and sectarian violence.

Senate Dems force Montana Senator out of the race

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The Democratic Party has forced appointed Montana Democratic Senator John Walsh to drop out of the race to win the seat on his own, after he was busted for extensive and very serious plagiarism last month. To recap what happened there:

An examination of the final paper required for Mr. Walsh’s master’s degree from the United States Army War College indicates the senator appropriated at least a quarter of his thesis on American Middle East policy from other authors’ works, with no attribution.

 
A further third of the content is cited but not quoted. Even the 800 word grand finale, for which Colonel Walsh had been praised by superiors, is directly ripped from a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace paper. When busted, he denied he did anything wrong, though he and his staff blamed combat-related PTSD as some sort of convoluted explanation or excuse. That hardly seems fair to all the other men and women who have served and returned from deeply stressful situations and did not plagiarize heavily to advance their military careers before leveraging their service into a political career. Only last week did he walk back the PTSD explanation and accept “full responsibility.” The War College investigation looks like it’s on track to strip him of his master’s degree.

Anyway, Democrats forced Walsh out of the race finally this week in a last-ditch effort to put somebody better on the ballot. This was essentially a lost cause bid to retain that Senate seat many months before the plagiarism story, so it’s not a huge blow, and it’s better to have him off the ballot. They’ve got a number of reasonably competent contenders — one of whom is profiled below by the New York Times — but the main focus at this point is keeping Democratic turnout reasonably high in Montana for the benefit of other races this November:

Two Montana Democrats, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said the party was considering Nancy Keenan, a former head of Naral Pro-Choice America, to become its nominee. Ms. Keenan has had conversations about the prospect with state Democrats, but she did not respond to messages seeking comment.
[…]
Democrats said an added imperative to fielding a strong candidate was the impact it would have on other races, notably the one for the state’s lone member of the House, in which they think their candidate, John Lewis, has a chance to take the seat from the Republicans. A number of contested state legislative contests are also on the ballot.

Ms. Keenan, a Montana native, left her post with Naral and returned to the Missoula area last year. She previously served as Montana’s superintendent of public instruction and has also served as a state representative.

One Democrat in the state noted that Ms. Keenan had a “national profile and national network” that would help her raise money quickly to give the party at least a chance to make the race competitive. Though Montana is a conservative-leaning state, it leans more libertarian on social issues such as abortion.

 
Much of this could have been avoided, too, if Democrats hadn’t engineered an early exit by Sen. Max Baucus (to become Ambassador to China) and if the Democratic governor hadn’t appointed one of the pre-existing candidates for the seat as the placeholder. They should have known better. In a set of 49 Senate appointments from 1956 to 2008 compiled by Nate Silver in December 2008, it was shown that of the 39 appointed Senators who sought election to their own terms, 20 of them were defeated in the primary of general elections. In other words, there’s slightly less than a 50-50 shot of an appointee winning the seat on his or her own, which doesn’t sound bad until put against the 88% re-election rate of Senators from 1990 to 2008.
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Kurds say US airstrikes have begun in Iraq tonight

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In an effort likely aimed at rescuing 50,000 starving Yazidi Kurd civilians trapped by ISIS on Mount Sinjar, Kurdish commanders say the U.S. has started airstrikes tonight on ISIS positions, in coordination with Kurdish peshmerga troops. The mountain, which is a Yazidi holy site near the Syrian border, is outside the normal zone of control of the Kurdish Regional Government and is virtually surrounded by the forces of Islamic State (of Syria & Iraq), following the recent Kurdish retreats.

From the New York Times:

An announcement on Kurdish television of what was described as an American intervention prompted street celebrations and horn-honking by residents of towns under siege by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Anwar Haji Osman, deputy minister of the pesh merga, the Kurdish military force, said in the televised statement that his forces had been in contact with the Americans and that the bombings had been carried out by fighter jets.

Kurdish officials said the bombings had initially targeted ISIS fighters who had seized two towns, Gwer and Mahmour, near the main Kurdish city of Erbil. A top Iraqi official in Baghdad close to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said that the Americans had consulted with the Iraqi government Thursday night about starting the campaign, the government had agreed and the bombing had begun.

 

Location of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq. (Credit: Urutseg on Wikimedia)

Location of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq. (Credit: Urutseg on Wikimedia)

The Pentagon is denying the reports of U.S. airstrikes there — though the Obama Administration has confirmed plans to drop food and supplies for the refugees — and tried to shift credit on to the Turkish military or Iraqi Air Force. While Turkey’s foreign minister did announce a food drop via helicopter, the government has denied conducting any airstrikes.

And although Iraq’s airforce has indeed been conducting airstrikes, they have already proven themselves far too incompetent to be responsible for the precision strikes near Sinjar. Iraqi airstrikes didn’t even make it past day 1 without indiscriminately obliterating big clusters of people who weren’t the intended target because the air force lacks the training — and desire — to be more careful or conscientious about their target selection. Killing 50 prisoners from your own side, while trying to liberate them by way of airstrikes, is not a smooth move.

The likeliest scenario is that this is a United States humanitarian intervention air campaign to try to rescue the Yazidis, a shrinking minority sect who have faced full-blown extermination campaigns by various factions more than 70 times in history. (Update, 8/8/14: The United States confirmed Friday morning that they had initiated airstrikes against ISIS missile launchers that were threatening Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish Regional Government. President Obama vowed to defend Erbil, a longtime U.S. ally city in northeastern Iraq, from any efforts by ISIS to move on it.)

In other news, the town of Qaraqosh also has fallen to ISIS and Christians are having to flee as the Kurdish Peshmerga troops fell back again. The town was one of the big centers of Iraq’s Christian populations. Earlier today, the UN claimed that the 50,000 trapped Yazidis were successfully and safely broken out, but US and most UK media outlets (following the lead of the US government) say they are still there. On another front, newly ISIS-aligned rebel forces in Syria struck at Lebanese military posts on the border, in retaliation for their failure to stop Hezbollah’s cross-border activities in support of the Syrian regime.

Are Republicans going the wrong way on higher ed reform?

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There’s a mounting push from Congressional Republicans (and some Democrats, possibly including Pres. Obama) to “break” the current accreditation system for higher education, to try to make college more affordable and more useful. Slate’s Jordan Weissman has a new piece out on the various efforts, titled The Dangerous Conservative Idea for Making College Cheaper. I think this article is on the right track and appropriately nuanced in its evaluation, despite the hardline headline:

Any conversation about fixing our broken accreditation system needs to think about both sides of the equation: making room for new ideas and pushing out bad ones. Right now, the majority of politicians are focused mostly on the first half, which should worry us all. You can talk about smashing the cartel all you want. But I’m not sure anybody would be happy with what might take its place.

 
There are some definite problems with the system as-is, but the solutions being pitched (by Republicans especially) are mostly off-base — such as ditching any system of regulation or quality control altogether, instead of fixing it — with some buried potential within them.

For example, it would actually be really interesting if major corporations could design apprenticeship-style programs that teach a transferable skills base useful to working in that industry (that company as well as the wider field) and have those programs being recognized in some way similar to a bachelor’s degree. But, again, that doesn’t require dismantling the entire accreditation system.

That said, I think the accreditation system does need to be dramatically shaken up to deal with the for-profit scam-school menace, which they’ve really let slide.

Additionally, I think that there’s some merit to the idea of reforming the financial aid system (though not the Republican way) to make sure it’s actually going to people who need it to go to school at all and that it’s purchasing a valuable education for those students. At the moment, it seems more geared toward handing out aid to upper-ish middle class kids (who will at least go to some college with or without financial aid) to help them pay for luxury name-brand schools instead of cheaper schools, and that’s allowing colleges to jack up everyone’s degree costs, given the inflated supply of available money to purchase them. In the same vein, we need to invest a lot more into the public higher education system to make those degrees both affordable to all and of exemplary and recognized quality.

Voter fraud belief is sore-loserism

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Out of more than 1 billion ballots cast since 2000, researcher Justin Levitt has found that there were no more than 31 credible instances of voter impersonation in the United States.

Levitt argues that those Americans who believe (incorrectly) that there is a widespread problem of elections being “stolen” via such frauds will continue to remain convinced of that as long as their preferred candidates continue to lose, regardless of voter ID laws. This seem plausible given that an existing study found that the relative prevalence of the belief in widespread fraud remains undiminished, even when strict voter ID laws are implemented. In other words, it has a lot more to do with repeatedly losing with unelectable candidates than elections being “stolen” from those candidates. Surprise, surprise.

Worse, thousands of voters (probably overwhelmingly legitimate voters) have already been turned away in 4 states for not having IDs that comply with the law, despite what is essentially the non-existence of the problem. Meanwhile, the laws can’t even stop most of the purported forms of fraud, even as they prevent (or make more difficult) legitimate voting…

Election fraud happens. But ID laws are not aimed at the fraud you’ll actually hear about. Most current ID laws aren’t designed to stop fraud with absentee ballots (indeed, laws requiring ID at the polls push more people into the absentee system, where there are plenty of real dangers). Or vote buying. Or coercion. Or fake registration forms. Or voting from the wrong address. Or ballot box stuffing by officials in on the scam. In the 243-page document that Mississippi State Sen. Chris McDaniel filed on Monday with evidence of allegedly illegal votes in the Mississippi Republican primary, there were no allegations of the kind of fraud that ID can stop.

Instead, requirements to show ID at the polls are designed for pretty much one thing: people showing up at the polls pretending to be somebody else in order to each cast one incremental fake ballot. This is a slow, clunky way to steal an election. Which is why it rarely happens.

 
And I don’t think that’s an argument for making other voting methods harder or for discouraging voter registration efforts. But it’s certainly an argument against making in-person voting harder and more expensive via voter ID laws that try to “solve” a problem that doesn’t exist.

ISIS rolls back Kurdish forces in Iraq. What’s next?

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ISIS — now known as “Islamic State” following its recent declaration of establishment — just won a significant operation against what is arguably Iraq’s most effective fighting force, the Kurdish Peshmerga paramilitaries. So, everything is probably really about to go sideways now.

The immediate loss of two more towns is another destabilizing and demoralizing blow:

The Islamic State captured the northern towns of Sinjar and Zumar on Saturday, prompting an estimated 40,000 from the minority Yazidi sect to flee, said Jawhar Ali Begg, a spokesman for the community.
[…]
“Their towns are now controlled by [Islamic State] and their shrine has been blown up,” Begg told The Associated Press. The group gave the Yazidis, who follow an ancient religion with links to Zoroastrianism, an ultimatum to convert to Islam, pay a tax or face death, Begg added.

 

But perhaps worse, through this operation, ISIS captured another northern oil field (number 5 in Iraq, not to mention their Syrian oil and gas fields), as well as the largest dam in all of Iraq, the massive hydroelectric Mosul Dam on the Tigris River. With every flare-up in violence or war since the 1986, there have been persistent fears that someone will intentionally blow it up to cause torrential and lethal downstream flooding in many major Iraqi cities.

The Kurdish troops, who retreated in the face of the ISIS advance after some fighting, assert that they were hung out to dry — not even getting sufficient ammunition assistance — by the central government of Iraq, which has been simultaneously blasting their separatist tendencies and explicitly relying upon them to “hold the line” against ISIS while they figure out what the do. The Kurds have been responsible for protecting thousands of refugees fleeing the city of Mosul, the center of ISIS operations in Iraq.
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