Category Archives: Arsenal Analysis

U.S. begins direct weapons shipments to Iraqi Kurds

  By

Last week, Kurdish fighters had faulted severe ammunition shortages and lack of help from Baghdad for the loss of a number of key northern cities and the abandonment of some strategic targets and vulnerable civilian populations. I predicted that, despite years of fearful resistance by the central government politicians to the idea of the United States re-arming the semi-autonomous Kurdish Regional Government without going through Baghdad, the United States would be forced to exactly that and fast. The New York Times reports that U.S. direct weapons supplies have begun:

The Central Intelligence Agency has begun directly supplying weapons to pesh merga fighters, administration officials said, after weeks of pleas and demands from leaders in the country’s semiautonomous Kurdish region for help in fighting ISIS. But it remains unclear just how much weaponry the United States has funneled through to the Kurds so far; Defense officials said they would probably begin sending small-arms munitions soon, too.

 
The move is sure to further infuriate the Sadrist Movement — Shia hardliners — and probably some of the Islamic Dawa Party members aligned with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (who appears to be strenuously resisting attempts to replace him), who have opposed anything that might decentralize power in Iraq.

An unnamed U.S. official also commented on the apparent disjunction between the hard-earned fierce and competent reputation of the Kurdish peshmerga troops and their repeated retreats in recent weeks (which continued today):

“The pesh merga are composed of capable, disciplined forces who deserve their reputation as fierce mountain-war fighters,” a United States official said. “However, it’s been almost a decade since their mostly light infantry brigades have been tested in battle, so it’s not surprising that they’ve taken some knocks from ISIL.”

 
That was what I was starting to hypothesize myself, in recent days: They were such effective guerrilla resistance forces that everyone eventually just left them alone, which then meant that after a while they were no longer “battle-tested.” In contrast, ISIS had battled its way across Syria and Western Iraq for more than a year, fighting against two central governments and competing insurgent forces. But with proper supplies, the Iraqi Kurds have a better shot than anyone else in the region for turning back ISIS.
Read more

Resistance against the police in Ferguson MO

  By

Over the weekend, a cop in Ferguson, Missouri (in St. Louis County) shot and killed an unarmed Black teenager in the back. The local Black community, which has borne the brunt of law enforcement activities in recent years (especially as the city has rapidly gone from almost 50-50 Black and White to being two-thirds Black), was quite understandably very angry about the situation and began protesting. Despite the FBI being brought in to take over the investigation of the case, the situation has continued to escalate as Ferguson’s police department mobilized very aggressively against the protesters.

After some property damage occurred yesterday (though most of the protests were peaceful and undeniably reasonable), the standoff being the police and protesters became even more tense until this evening when the police began corralling and attacking the assembled community members.

Below are some firsthand videos posted by a City of St. Louis Ward Alderman, Antonio French:

And here’s a report from NBC St. Louis:

This aggression toward the community they are supposed to be protecting is yet another demonstration of the terrible results of Department of Homeland Security handing out grant money like candy to provide military-grade equipment and riot gear to local police forces all over the country.

Meanwhile, the U.S. media seems hellbent on driving the narrative that this story isn’t about the cold-blooded street execution of an unarmed child — or about the wider problem of police aggression and occupation of American black populations, or about legitimate resistance to unfair and violent practices. Rather, they’re obsessed with the idea that there might be “looting” happening or that there is a “riot.”

Screen Shot 2014-08-11 at 12.10.30 AM

Here’s the reality of the situation: Unarmed Black American kids keep getting shot to death for no reason on the false assumption they’re packing, and there’s rarely any justice. Meanwhile, unhinged adult White American men with avowedly anti-government views can walk around unchallenged in public places with assault rifles, telling you all about their “rights” and how important those are.

Is this country ever going to stop perpetrating and ignoring outrageous daily violence against and extrajudicial executions of Black Americans?

And I don’t think the media gets to decide who has the right to decide who has the right to resist (or how) when police keep targeting and fatally misjudging a population and then refuse to uphold the First Amendment’s guarantee of “the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The Israeli Military-Industrial-State Complex

  By

On our last radio episode, Persephone made a case that countries that sell weapons around the world as a big revenue source have a conflict of interest on fostering peace, in that it might affect their export revenues.

In many of the British examples we discussed, the sales are generally from private firms. In the United States, it’s a mix of private sales versus government discounted arms transfers and surplus equipment sales to allied armed forces, for strategic and fiscal reasons. A country’s government has an especially strong incentive to sell weapons to other countries when it devotes significant expenditures to research and development of the weapons. It’s a way to make some of it back.

Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, published an article today on the Israeli defense industry’s ramped-up production and foreign sales efforts during the recent bombardment, shielding, and ground operations against the Gaza Strip. Although there have been some major privatizations in recent years, much of the country’s defense industry is still composed of wholly-government-owned state enterprises. They have long been burdened with debt and were facing budget cuts. That means that if the companies — and by extension their government owners — were going to turn things around financially, they had a strong incentive to sell a lot of weapons to other countries. And as the article explores, through repeated examples, nothing sells a new weapons technology like real-life combat tests.

Some of the companies were even rushing brand new products off the assembly lines and into the field. And even as they were being deployed in the Gaza Strip, purchasers were flocking to Israel for explicit sales pitches, Haaretz reported:

“For the defense industries this campaign is like drinking a very strong energy drink — it simply gives them tremendous forward momentum,” says Barbara Opall-Rome, Israel bureau chief for the U.S. magazine Defense News. “Combat is like the highest seal of approval when it comes to the international markets. What has proven itself in battle is much easier to sell. Immediately after the operation, and perhaps even during, all kinds of delegations arrive here from countries that appreciate Israel’s technological capabilities and are interested in testing the new products.”

 
From new light arms ammunition to new tank shells and tank defenses, Israel’s private defense firms (which have excellent lobbyists and ties to the government) and public state defense companies (which are expected to minimize balance sheet losses and turn a profit for the government if possible), there’s a lot of really warped policy incentives in favor of pursuing a very aggressive, even hair-trigger “defense policy” in the Palestinian Territories.

Similarly, with highly experimental, very expensive, and very re-sellable technologies like a missile defense system co-designed by a state defense company, it could be suggested that goading an entity into firing daily barrages of missiles at a shield that will catch virtually all of them is an excellent way to prove to buyer countries that they should purchase the system for their own defense needs.

A country with big, financially struggling, government-owned defense firms puts itself under a lot of pressure to enable situations that will allow for combat demonstrations to foreign observers who can buy products and put money back in the government coffers (or at least reduce the need for direct budget expenditures). It’s possible to resist that pressure, but it’s there.

It’s hard to make peace when your finances are aligned in favor of making war. That’s true to some extent with the United States and many of the other countries we mentioned on our radio segment. But it’s particularly worrying with regard to Israel, where government and the defense industry are even more intertwined.
iron-dome-interceptor

Summary of developments in northern Iraq for August 9, 2014

  By

The Obama Administration is apparently determined to prevent the fall of Erbil, Kurdistan Region’s capital, at all costs (or at the very least whatever it takes short of ground troops — though that might be on the table, too, as discussed below). It’s one of the advantages of being a longstanding protectorate and ally of the United States. The President ordered airstrikes on ISIS missile launchers and mortars as soon as Erbil came under long-range attack because most of the U.S. presence in Iraq (outside Baghdad itself) is located there and locals were already evacuating in a panic. The concern was that mass evacuation left Americans at the Erbil consulate and other sites even more vulnerable.

The U.S. military also asserts that the ISIS capture of Mosul Dam poses a risk to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, so I suspect it’s within the realm of possibility that we may see U.S. Special Forces land to re-take it very soon. Presumably this would be a very limited action to eject ISIS troops from the dam facilities and (one hopes) set up more secure defenses to help local paramilitaries and the Iraqi security forces hold it against future attacks. The destruction of this Tigris river dam, as attempted unsuccessfully by Saddam Hussein in 2003, would likely release quasi-apocalyptic flood conditions on the rest of Iraq to the south. That, however, would require ISIS to make the calculation that destroying the city of Mosul and much of their own territory in the process was worth the destructive power further south. It seems more probable they will use the dam, which is the country’s largest hydroelectric dam, to cut off water and power to the south. A 65-foot tall wall of water smashing through Mosul, the most important city in ISIS hands, seems a bit too Hollywood. Thus, it might not make much sense for the U.S. military to try to re-take the dam.

On the other northern front, Syrian Kurdish forces say they have broken out 10% of the Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar, which is located near the Iraq-Syria border. They will be taken across into an anti-ISIS rebel-held area of Syrian Kurdistan.

The mountain, which is perhaps better described as a 25-mile-long and 10-mile-wide ridge, is a dozen or so miles from the Syrian border.

USGS Satellite Image of Mount Sinjar ridge. Dark, bent line in the upper left corner is the Syrian border.

USGS Satellite Image of Mount Sinjar ridge. Dark, bent line in the upper left corner is the Syrian border.

It’s a very distressing situation. Before any evacuations, 40-50,000 people were trapped on a mountain without food or water, completely surrounded by ISIS forces. The latter are reported slowly starting to move in and are snatching women and girls. U.S. and Kurdish relief aircraft are continuing to drop food, water, and other supplies on to the mountain — reportedly under enemy fire.

Meanwhile, the Kurdistan Region has had to absorb 200,000 internally displaced Iraqis since Monday alone. On top of that, tens of thousands of local residents started moving southward within the region on Thursday in an effort to evacuate before ISIS invades.

Who are the Yazidis at Mount Sinjar right now?

  By

Yesterday, U.S. and Turkish relief military operations began to try to help tens of thousands of displaced Yazidi Iraqi civilians who have been surrounded without food or water at Mount Sinjar, a Yazidi holy site, by ISIS forces.

These civilians belong to a long-suffering minority religious sect based in Iraq, and their latest oppressors at ISIS have shown themselves to be deeply inflexible toward even their own fellow Sunni Muslim Arabs. The Yazidi adherents are a predominantly Kurdish-speaking people but are very close-knit and inward-looking, like many of the very small Middle Eastern minority religious groups, most of which also prohibit marriage outside the faith on pain of death.

For global perspective, the Yazidi population has faced over 70 different concerted attempts in history to exterminate their entire population. This is done on the grounds they are “devil worshipers,” in an apparent misinterpretation of their monotheistic fusion doctrine that merges elements of Islam, Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, and a range of other Mesopotamian, classical, and pre-modern Middle Eastern faiths from the northern Iraq and western Iran areas. The primary point of contention is that they believe God’s most favored archangel (Azazel/Lucifer) did not fall from grace (to become Shaitan/Satan) and should be revered for refusing to bend to mankind on the orders of God, because he was actually complying with earlier orders from God not to bow to anyone, and God made him the leader of the archangels as a reward for remembering that.

The Yazidis are now a relatively small sect worldwide (no more than 700,000 and possibly less than 250,000). There are 40,000-50,000 members trapped on the mountain right now. It’s difficult to keep track of their current numbers after more than a decade of nationwide unrest in Iraq, but that figure may amount to more than half the remaining homeland/Iraqi population of Yazidi followers.

In 2007, New York Times reported at the time, terrorists detonated four bombs that were so big they flattened two entire towns full of Yazidis. The eventual death toll was estimated at just under 800, making it the second worst terrorist attack in modern world history — and one that further shrank an already endangered community.

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

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

Iraq’s Air Force: Incompetent or Intentionally Cruel?

  By

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

  By

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.
Read more