Jonah Shepp

A Sudden Crisis

by Dish Staff

As the UN refugee agency launches its largest aid effort in more than a decade to help the hundreds of thousands of displaced people in northern Iraq, Swati Sharma remarks on how rapidly the humanitarian disaster has unfolded:

The rate at which the situation in Iraq has deteriorated is the largest reason why it is being called one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent years. Let’s compare it with Syria.

While the climate there is extremely volatile, it has been deteriorating for more than three years. In comparison, conflicts in Iraq mostly started this year, and the worst of it commenced in June, when the Islamic State (then ISIS) took Mosul. Today, the number of displaced Iraqis is at 1.5 million — small in comparison to Syria’s 6.5 million — but almost 600,000 of them fled their homes in the past two months. Still, many were able to find homes and shelters in communities around northern Iraq.

In early August, Islamic State moved farther north. When the militant group took the northern region in and around the town of Sinjar, where many Yazidis live, more than 200,000 had to flee. Many were stranded on Mount Sinjar with dwindling resources, causing the Obama administration to launch airstrikes against the Islamic State.

Why Intervene In Iraq And Not Syria? Ctd

by Jonah Shepp

Lionel Beehner quibbles with Marc Lynch’s assessment that if the US had given arms to the Syrian rebels early on in the civil war, it would not have shortened the conflict or prevented the collapse of the state and the rise of ISIS. After highlighting some political science research to show that the question of whether outside interventions can help end civil wars is not settled, he throws this bomb:

Perhaps, then, the question we should be asking is not whether third-party interventions are, on average, helpful or harmful to civil war termination. The answer invariably is: Well, it depends. Rather, we should be asking: Is the world back in a 19th century multipolar paradigm, whereby civil wars were primarily fought between pro-democracy versus conservative/monarchist forces, and the latter typically won because their interventions were more robust and one-sided? …

In the current context, the anti-democratic axis as it were – that is, the Russia’s and Iran’s of this world – appear more willing to go “all in” to support their “proxies” than their pro-democracy counterparts in the West. That means we may be getting into bidding wars not that we can’t win – we have the bank and arms to outspend and out-supply just about anyone – but which we lack the will to win, whether due to flagging public support, setting too high a bar of excellence for our rebel or regime proxies (or fear of Mujahidin-like blowback), or – and this is where the 19th century comparison may be apt – because the stakes for us are perceived to be lower than they are for the Putins of this world.

Beehner can’t seriously believe that civil wars today are “primarily fought between pro-democracy versus conservative/monarchist forces”. On what side of this Manichaean divide would he place the Ukrainian separatists? Is the Muslim Brotherhood “pro-democracy” or “conservative”? What about Hamas? Which side is “pro-democracy” in Libya? Or Afghanistan? Or Sudan, or the Central African Republic, or Mali, or DR Congo? And for that matter, are all opponents of the Syrian regime “pro-democracy”? We know the answer to that one. Beehner’s broad characterization of contemporary civil wars seems breathtakingly reductive to me. Responding to it, Daniel Larison rightly warns against “projecting Westerners’ preferences onto anti-regime Syrians”:

It is a mistake to think of contemporary civil wars in terms of some sort of international contest between democracy and authoritarianism, not least because it creates the false impression that the U.S. and its democratic allies have something at stake in these conflicts when we don’t. There are illiberal authoritarians aplenty on both sides in Syria, but there are hardly any democrats of any kind to be found, and that wouldn’t have been changed by a larger commitment of U.S. resources at any point. The ability to provide arms and funding to anti-regime forces has never been in doubt, but skeptics have been absolutely right to doubt the wisdom and desirability providing this aid.

Look, I’d love to live in a world where every conflict has a “democratic” side. I’ll admit that when the Syrian civil war began as a series of largely peaceful demonstrations in early 2011, I had high hopes for change (and I think Larison may be overstating the absence of democratic elements in the Syrian opposition, at least looking back at that time). Such was the zeitgeist in the Arab world at the moment, when the fall of Ben Ali and Mubarak made anything seem possible, and I was as caught up in it as anyone else. When Bashar al-Assad made clear that demands for reform would be met with deadly force and the protest movement transformed into an armed uprising, I thought some kind of American intervention on the FSA’s behalf was a pretty reasonable proposition (though reading Lynch on the subject gave me pause).

But there was more going on in Syria than met the eye: the civil war turned out to be more of a messy sectarian power struggle than a battle between democracy and totalitarianism, and as it has dragged on over the past three years, the moral calculus has only become cloudier. The main target of my anger for how things turned out remains Assad himself, who could have prevented all of this death and destruction had he been willing to engage with the protesters of 2011 rather than gun them down. Instead he chose to run with the narrative that Islamist terrorists were out to bring down his regime and proceeded to torture and murder his opponents by the tens of thousands, radicalizing the rebels and leading to… well, have you read the news lately?

But in a state where no such thing as civil society has ever really existed, where democrats and Muslim Brothers alike have been tortured and massacred, and where Assad’s Alawite coreligionists believed (and still do) that they would be held collectively responsible for the regime’s misdeeds in the event that Assad ever went away, I highly doubt there was a way for the US to intervene on behalf of “freedom” and “democracy”, rather than merely empower some other faction. Regional leadership, such as the Arab League has continually failed to demonstrate, might have been able to pull it off, but as we ought to have learned from Iraq, there are very hard limits to what American guns can accomplish in service of the causes of liberty and peace.

(Photo: A Syrian man reacts while standing on the rubble of his house while others look for survivors and bodies in the Tariq al-Bab district of the northern city of Aleppo on February 23, 2013. By Pablo Tosco/AFP/Getty Images)

Will Foley’s Murder Change Obama’s Iraq Plans?

by Dish Staff

In the wake of James Foley’s murder, Fred Kaplan urges Obama to start building a regional coalition to defeat ISIS:

If the jihadists of ISIS are as dangerous as Obama says they are (and the evidence suggests they are), then it’s time to plow through diplomatic niceties and pursue the common interests of nations with which we otherwise might not get along. Yes, it’s politically awkward, to say the least, for Obama to make common cause, even on this one issue, with Assad (a monster whom he once said “must go”) and the mullahs of Tehran (most of whom regard America as the “great Satan”). But in World War II, Roosevelt and Churchill joined with Stalin to defeat Hitler—and, if they hadn’t, Hitler would have won.

The net against ISIS should be widened further. A good model here is the 1990–91 Gulf War, in which Presidents George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker assembled a vast coalition to push Saddam Hussein’s army out of Kuwait. Nearly every Arab country in the region—Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, even Syria—sent whole armored divisions or air wings. Many of them didn’t do much in the war, but the important point was that they were there. Their presence demonstrated that this wasn’t a war of Western imperialists against Muslim Iraq; it was a multinational war against aggression.

Jacob Siegel expects the US intervention in Iraq to escalate, but points out that merely holding the recent gains against ISIS will require a sustained involvement anyway:

Defeating ISIS in an open confrontation has not been part of any proposed plan, but weakening the group and pushing back its advances could go from the de facto U.S. approach to the official strategy if the air campaign expands. The most visible result of the air campaign is the retaking of the Mosul Dam, a key piece of infrastructure that ISIS captured from Kurdish forces in early August. After a sustained bombing campaign with more than half the total U.S. airstrikes so far, 51 out 84 targeting ISIS positions around the dam, it was retaken Tuesday by Kurdish Peshmerga and Iraqi special forces.

The dam is no longer in ISIS’s hands, but keeping it that way may require keeping American airpower on call for the foreseeable future.

Spencer Ackerman scopes out what sort of escalation might be in the works:

One option under consideration, not directly related to the Foley killing, is a request for hundreds of more US marines to deploy to Baghdad to bolster security at the US embassy and related installations. The request, made by the State Department recently, is said not to be a response to an new anticipated push by Isis into Baghdad, which it has stopped short of attempting to seize. An official who was not cleared to speak to the press characterized it as coming out of an abundance of caution. …

The US Central Command continued on Wednesday to send fighter jets and armed drones to harass Isis near the Mosul Dam, a critical piece of infrastructure that the US considers to no longer be under Isis control. The warplanes launched 14 strikes against Isis vehicles and weaponry, tacitly a rejection of Isis’ demand with the Foley killing that the US relent in its newest air campaign in Iraq.

Ramping up the air campaign may soon become easier, as Baghdad appears willing to let US bombers take off from Iraqi bases:

The back-channel discussions over the bases, which have not previously been reported, highlight the White House’s uncertainty about escalating its low-level air war against the Islamic State. President Barack Obama proudly pulled all U.S. troops out of Iraq in late 2011. He has repeatedly stressed that the military campaign there that began Aug. 8 will be limited in both scope and duration. With broad swaths of Syria and Iraq under Islamic State control, key U.S. allies are pressing the administration to step up the fight. Taking off from Iraqi bases would make it much easier to do so because it would put the American aircraft closer to their targets.

“Everything is harder when you’re doing it from the outside,” a senior military official said. At issue is a little-noticed aspect of this air campaign: None of the strikes against Islamic State targets inside Iraq have been carried out by U.S. aircraft based inside Iraq.

Morrissey flags a new poll showing that 54 percent of the American public supports airstrikes against ISIS:

Obama deserves credit for taking action, if belatedly and perhaps not as robustly as some would like. So far, though, Americans aren’t inclined to think that his policies in Iraq have improved. His approval rating in June on the question was 42/52, and today it’s 42/51. In fact, slightly more strongly disapprove now (36%, from 34%) and slightly fewer strongly approve (16% from 17%) than in June, although all of those moves are within the margin of error. Interestingly, the American public likes the air strikes, but not arming the Kurds, which seems like more of a slam-dunk.

Foley’s British Executioner, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Out of respect for James Foley I will NEVER watch the video of his murder. This is how he should be remembered pic.twitter.com/2BXE22MKp2
— Karim Lebhour (@KaLebhour) August 20, 2014

The ISIS jihadist who beheaded American journalist James Foley in a video released by the group on Tuesday has been identified:

As an international manhunt got under way on Wednesday, the English-speaking militant was identified to the Guardian by one of his former hostages as the ringleader of three British jihadists thought to be the main guards of foreign nationals in Raqqa, a stronghold of Islamic State (Isis) rebels. The militant who appeared on the Foley video, who called himself John and is believed to be from London, was said to be the main rebel negotiator during talks earlier this year to release 11 Islamic State hostages – who were eventually handed to Turkish officials after ransom demands were met.

The FBI, MI5 and Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command were all on Wednesday night racing to identify the militant who fronted the propaganda video that showed the brutal murder of Foley, the journalist who had been missing in Syria since 2012. Sources in Syria recognised the man as a point-man for hostage negotiations in Raqqa, where he is said to have held discussions with several families of jailed foreign nationals over the internet.

Josh Rogin and Eli Lake link Foley’s abduction and murder to a ring of foreign-born jihadists suspected in the kidnapping of other journalists in Syria. Several members of that ring were arrested and charged with false imprisonment shortly before Foley was kidnapped in November 2012:

The case fell apart because the two Western journalists who had been abducted in Syria in July 2012 and could identify the suspects did not appear to testify at the trial. One of them had testified against Shajul Islam at pretrial proceedings and said Islam was part of a cell of foreign-born extremists in Syria that included 10 to 15 U.K. citizens. Islam, through his lawyer, denied being involved in the abductions at the time.

One U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast that both U.S. and British counter-terrorism agencies have taken a keen interest in the suspected militants. “There is no official product on this yet for the intelligence community,” this official said. “But people who are out there and collecting on this believe the [Foley] abduction and the [Islam] trial are connected.”

The US had apparently tried to rescue Foley last month:

Details on the nature of the unsuccessful operation remained sparse late Wednesday. When American forces landed in eastern Syria — most likely in Raqqa province, where Foley is thought to have been held and killed — they came under heavy fire. The elite troops killed a number of militants, and one of the pilots involved in the operation sustained a minor injury when his aircraft came under fire, a senior administration official told Foreign Policy.

According to a defense official with knowledge of the situation, the operation occurred in early July. The same official added that the operation was based mostly on human intelligence — as opposed to satellite photographs and intercepted communications — and the military now believes the hostages had been moved from that location just days before the raid took place.

Obama denounced the killing in a press conference yesterday afternoon, calling ISIS a “cancer” but not committing to a particular course of action in response. After weighing the pros and cons of a retaliatory effort, Zack Beauchamp sees the president in a bind:

Obama’s Wednesday statement was two things: an emotional tribute to James Foley’s life, and a furious condemnation of ISIS and its goals. “Jim Foley’s life stands in stark contrast to his killers,” the president said. “[ISIS] has no ideology of any value to human beings. their ideology is bankrupt.”

What the presser wasn’t, however, was a policy address. Saying “the United States will continue to do what we must do to protect our people,” as Obama did, doesn’t say much about the choice between “hit them harder” and “don’t take the bait,” or any other clear US action or lack thereof. The American policy response is still just unclear. Regardless of what the US ends up doing, it should be clear that this isn’t an easy call for Obama. Sadly, it’s much harder to destroy ISIS than it is to condemn the atrocities they commit.

The Guardian weighs in on what Foley’s murder means in terms of the Anglo-American role in the fight against ISIS:

Bluntly put: if we target them, they will target us. The foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, was right to say on Wednesday that we – Americans and British in particular – have always been in their sights as one of the “far enemies” they reckon with. But fighter bombers over the Mosul dam, arms for the Kurds and help for the Baghdad government bring us more into the “near enemy” category, and that has consequences. Consequences in the region and, potentially, consequences at home in the United States and Europe.

We should not be alone in a contest with Isis. Regional powers should take on a greater role, perhaps even military, but certainly a more coherent diplomatic role. There should be a suspension of the rivalries which helped create the opportunity Isis seized.

Public Assistance Isn’t “Free Money”

by Jonah Shepp

Darlena Cunha, a mother of twins who spent 18 months on the WIC program (while working full time and paying taxes), brings some personal perspective to bear on why drug testing welfare recipients amounts to utter overkill in a welfare system that already assumes all applicants are lying:

It’s also not just a phone call and done. Women applying must be pregnant or up to six months post-partum. Children can receive services up to their fifth birthday, according to the United States Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Services. Once you’ve called, you have to provide proof of income for everyone in the household, proof of identity, proof of residence, proof of participation in any other program—including Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or General Assistance—immunization records for your children, pregnancy confirmation (official note from your doctor), recent height and weight measurements and a blood test for hemoglobin levels, and a WIC Referral Form from your doctor. You also have to provide documentation of any child support payments, unemployment benefits, or short-term disability money received. These requirements vary slightly from state to state, but for the most part they are consistent. …

Applying and being accepted for aid is a mentally grueling process that can stretch on for months. Add to that the humiliation of having to pee in a cup just because you can’t afford to eat.

I’ve touched on this before (and garnered some angry e-mails from readers for suggesting that Paul Ryan was on to something about how demoralizing it can be to live on welfare), but I’m always glad to see someone speak on this from a personal perspective, given how few such stories make their way into the public consciousness. I grew up on welfare in New York City in the 80s and 90s with an alcoholic single mother, so my experience in the system is very different from Cunha’s, yet I agree abundantly with the main thrust of her argument, which cannot be stressed enough: welfare is not exactly designed to make recipients feel good about themselves.

Conservative critics of the welfare state tend to denigrate it as easy money for doing nothing, and often imply or claim outright that poor people feel no shame in taking it because they (I should say, “we”) have no conception of the moral value of labor or feel that we are “entitled” to our food stamps and Obama Phones. That may be true of some poor Americans (Indeed, I have at least one or two family members who fit that description), but it’s not at all representative of those who receive public assistance. The welfare system is badly in need of fixing, not primarily because it’s too expensive but rather because it doesn’t do enough to help ameliorate entrenched poverty. Reform conservatives have some decent ideas about how to do that, but as long as this caricature of the poor is the starting point for their critique of the welfare state, they shouldn’t be surprised if they have a hard time finding an audience.

People tend to take it personally when you call them freeloaders and layabouts. Who knew?

(Photo by Francis Storr)

The Adaptable ISIS

by Dish Staff

While US airstrikes and advances by Kurdish forces have begun to reverse the gains ISIS has made in recent weeks, Joshua Keating doubts the group will be easily defeated:

Over the past few months, the group has shown remarkable flexibility in both its tactics and its targets, one of its key advantages over the national governments trying to stamp it out. If its progress against Baghdad stalls, it can turn against Erbil. If it suffers a setback in Iraq, it can simply focus its efforts on Syria (or Lebanon), where the dynamics of the ground as well as the international alliances work completely differently. If U.S. airstrikes turn the tide against it on the battlefield, it can turn back to urban warfare or suicide bombings.

In other words, a group like ISIS is perfectly positioned to exploit the hazy national boundaries, sectarian divisions, and mistrust among governments in the region where it operates. Given that those factors don’t seem to be going away anytime soon, my guess is that the Islamic State will find a way to regroup. British Prime Minister David Cameron is probably right to be warning the public of a long fight to come.

Yochi Dreazen warns that ISIS is also getting better at governing the territory it controls:

U.S. intelligence officials say the leaders of the Islamic State are adopting methods first pioneered by Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Shiite militia, and are devoting considerable human and financial resources toward keeping essential services like electricity, water, and sewage functioning in their territory. In some areas, they even operate post offices. …

Taken together, the moves highlight the fact that the Islamic State, already the best-armed and best-funded terror group in the world, is quickly adapting to the challenges of ruling and governing. That, in turn, dramatically reduces the chances that the extremists will face homegrown opposition in what amounts to the world’s newest territory.

Accordingly, Faysal Itani argues that the key to defeating ISIS is to treat it like the state it claims to be:

Above all, ISIS wants to control territory and borders. Otherwise it is just one militia among many others in Syria and Iraq. This requires fighting on multiple fronts against multiple enemies, within both Syria and Iraq. That means openly moving fighters, arms and equipment across vast desert areas. Therefore, like any conventional army, ISIS is prone to overstretch. These increasingly lengthy lines of communication are prime targets for ground and air attacks that would destroy ISIS’ territorial integrity and fighting capability. …

But ISIS is adaptive, creative and ambitious. By contrast, the international community’s response has been rigid, predictable and unimaginative. If it continues to see and treat ISIS as simply a terrorist group, the international community will forever be playing defense, which ISIS can happily live with, until it no longer has to and can go on the offensive abroad. Unless its rivals understand and treat ISIS as a state, and exploit the vulnerabilities statehood presents, ISIS will continue to outclass them in ambition and sophistication, and it will have its state.

A Better Set Of Lies

by Jonah Shepp

Rosie Gray flags Russia Today’s new ad campaign:

“The campaign will be comprised of several different posters, and we kicked it off with wild postings in the New York City,” RT spokesperson Anna Belkina said in an email. “Soon it will be extended to Washington, DC, and London.” … The ads feature a picture of Colin Powell with the tagline: “This is what happens when there is no second opinion. Iraq War: No WMDs, 141,802 civilian deaths. Go to RT.com for the second opinion.” Another poster says, “In case they shut us down on TV, go to RT.com for the second opinion.”

Asked whether RT believes it is in danger of being shut down on American television, Belkina provided a statement from RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan: “Alternative voices, however rare, are often met with fear, hostility and bureaucratic obstructionism in the attempt to stifle them — because they are inconvenient to the establishment. We want the viewers to know that no matter what, RT will remain THE place to go to for that second opinion.”

That’s a well-crafted message, and it illustrates one of the many ways in which the massive missteps of the Bush era are coming back to bite us.

Lies empower lies, and the lies that underpinned the neoconservative project, helped along by a cowed press that parroted them, were inevitably going to create an opening for foreign propaganda outlets and homegrown conspiracy theorists to tell a skeptical public what was “really” going on. When the establishment’s narrative is revealed to be false, that lends credibility to “alternative” narratives, whether they are true or not, and creates a market for anything that contradicts the official line. A deceitful government and a wimpy media make us vulnerable to propaganda. The Obama administration shares some blame for this, but, well, there’s a reason it’s Colin Powell on that poster and not Hillary Clinton.

The most disquieting feature of the poster is that its headline is correct. The foreign propaganda outlets masquerading before American liberals as objective news sources (RT and al-Jazeera in particular, but Iran’s Press TV also comes to mind) are enabled by the fact that when they tell us that our government has lied to us about matters of great magnitude, that thousands have died because of those lies, and that even well-respected mainstream media outlets failed to uncover those lies until it was far too late, whatever else they may be, they’re right about that.

The Tyranny Of The Anonymous

by Jonah Shepp

Jack Shafer rails on news outlets for being way too generous with anonymity for their sources:

An Aug 13 Times piece noted that U.S. administration officials “spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.” This justification has become so popular in modern journalism that when you drop it into Nexis, the database burps and informs you that the query will return more than 3,000 stories containing the passage or something very close to it. If a lower anonymity bar than “was not authorized to speak publicly” exists, I cannot imagine it. Very few people are authorized to speak publicly in government, corporations, and institutions. Does that mean that anybody who has accepted a muzzle can expect anonymity from the press? The huge numbers coughed up by Nexis support that notion.

Another anonymity justification that rattles Nexis’ foundations is the source who “spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.” On Aug. 12, the sensitive-topic source was an Iraqi official speaking the Washington Post. And what sort irreplaceable information did the official impart? “We are entering a potential clash. … On the ground, [there are] tanks and armored vehicles. It’s a very complicated situation with the army.” Yes, yes, tanks, armored vehicles, and a complication situation! Very sensitive information. For giving the paper these gems, the source deserves placement in the Post‘s witness protection program.

I learned a lot about the perniciousness of anonymous sources while working as a newspaper editor in Jordan, a country whose press isn’t censored or brutalized as it is in, say, China or Iran, but isn’t exactly “free” either. I can’t tell you how many times I had some variant of the following conversation:

Me: Who’s this “source in the ministry who declined to be named”?

Reporter: Well, actually, it’s the minister himself. But he doesn’t want to announce this officially yet, so he asked me not to use his name.

Me: That’s dishonest.

Reporter: I know, but if I quote him by name he’ll get mad at me and stop answering my phone calls.

Me: …

…and so of course we’d quote the minister anonymously. The lame explanations Shafer cites (“not authorized to speak to the press” and “because of the sensitivity of the topic”) appeared in the paper daily, and still do. But that’s not because The Jordan Times is specifically lacking in journalistic integrity: rather, journalistic integrity is simply not an option in a country where the anonymous government source is often the only source available, and where looking for other, better sources can get a journalist in all sorts of legal or extralegal trouble.

Of course, hardly anybody in the government is “authorized to speak to the press”, but leaking information – or misinformation – through anonymous sources is a great way to establish a veneer of transparency without any real accountability. It’s also a great way to mislead the public that a source is speaking against the government’s wishes, when in fact he is revealing exactly what he’s been instructed to reveal. One of the most important lessons I took away from that experience is that crafty, illiberal governments can still exercise significant control over an ostensibly “independent” press, through vague laws, self-censorship, “soft containment”, and anonymity as the rule rather than the exception. The payoff comes in the form of praise and aid from Western governments for whom press freedom in name alone is too often good enough.

In light of that lesson, the scourge of government anonymity in the American press is even more unsettling. While Shafer’s right to criticize the NYT and the WaPo for lowering the bar here, what worries me most is that the leak-by-anonymous-source method of engagement with the media has become standard operating procedure in Washington. A government that can’t tell the public what it’s up to without hiding behind vague statements from nameless officials is simply not to be trusted, and a press that goes along with it is not quite as “free” as we’d like to think.

Did Snowden Tip Off Al-Qaeda’s Cryptographers? Ctd

by Jonah Shepp

Not by a long shot, Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman answer, hitting back forcefully at the report claiming that al-Qaeda overhauled its cryptography in response to the Snowden leaks. To begin with, they point out that Recorded Future, the intelligence firm that issued the report, has deep and longstanding financial ties to the US intelligence community and as such cannot be considered an independent referee. Furthermore, another Snowden document reveals that al-Qaeda already knew about Western intelligence agencies’ surveillance technologies and how to get around them, long before Snowden came into the picture:

The Recorded Future “report”—which was actually nothing more than a short blog post—is designed to bolster the year-long fear-mongering campaign of U.S. and British officials arguing that terrorists would realize the need to hide their communications and develop effective means of doing so by virtue of the Snowden reporting. … But actual terrorists—long before the Snowden reporting—have been fixated on developing encryption methods and other techniques to protect their communications from electronic surveillance. And they have succeeded in a quite sophisticated manner.

One document found in the GCHQ archive provided by Snowden is a 45-page, single-spaced manual that the British spy agency calls a “Jihadist Handbook.” Though undated, the content suggests it was originally written in 2002 or 2003: more than 10 years before the Snowden reporting began. It appears to have been last updated shortly after September 2003, and translated into English by GCHQ sometime in 2005 or 2006. … So sophisticated is the 10-year-old “Jihadist Manual” that, in many sections, it is virtually identical to the GCHQ’s own manual, developed years later (in 2010), for instructing its operatives how to keep their communications secure[.]

Greenwald and Fishman also stress that the report offers no evidence to support a causal link between the Snowden leaks and al-Qaeda’s recent crypto upgrades:

Critically, even if one wanted to accept Recorded Future’s timeline as true, there are all sorts of plausible reasons other than Snowden revelations why these groups would have been motivated to develop new encryption protections. One obvious impetus is the August 2013 government boasting to McClatchy (and The Daily Beast) that the State Department ordered the closing of 21 embassies because of what it learned from an intercepted “conference call” among Al Qaeda leaders

This speaks to an infraction we in the media are frequently guilty of: lending greater weight to new information when it feeds into a pre-existing narrative, regardless of whether that new information is credible on its own merits. Officials in the government and the intelligence community have spent the past year crying to the press that Snowden’s revelations have weakened America’s defenses against terrorism by revealing our tradecraft to our enemies. Spooks are not wont to provide proof for such claims, because the evidence always seems to be classified, but “if only we knew what they knew”, we’d see that they were right. And it requires no great leaps of logic to intuit that al-Qaeda and its allies, who clearly know a thing or two about the Internet, might have come across the Snowden leaks and used them to their advantage.

So that narrative, underpinned by intuition but not hard evidence, became conventional, at least on one side of the surveillance debate. There was a demand for proof of that received wisdom, and when something purporting to be that proof came to light, the product was delivered to the market with all due speed. And giving people tools to support the opinions they already hold, rather than distinguishing truth from propaganda, is the core business of much of today’s clickbaity media. That’s a serious problem.

On the other hand, the full impact of these leaks won’t be clear for some time, and the question of whether and to what extent they exposed us to new threats is not conclusively settled, so Snowden and Greenwald can’t claim vindication any more surely than their critics can call them traitors and terrorists. But the broader point, that Snowden shouldn’t be convicted of treason in the court of public opinion solely based on accusations and innuendo, stands strong. We’d do well to remember that the next time we come across “evidence” like this.

Kurdistan’s Sticky Situation

by Jonah Shepp

Oil may not be the be-all, end-all of the Iraq conflict, but it does play its part. Brad Plumer examines the oil politics of Iraqi Kurdistan and what’s at stake in the fight against ISIS:

By June of this year, Iraqi Kurdistan was producing 360,000 barrels per day — about 10 percent of Iraq’s production (and about 0.5 percent of the world’s supply). And much more was expected. In a 2009 State Department cable leaked by Wikileaks, one foreign firm said Kurdistan “has the potential to be a world-class hydrocarbon region.” Yet ISIS posed a (partial) threat to that boom when they showed up on the outskirts of Erbil, a city of 1.5 million that is hosting many of the oil and gas firms in the Kurdish region. On August 8, Reuters reported that some 5,000 barrels per day had gone offline in Kurdistan as a result of the fighting. Various oil firms, including Chevron, said they would withdraw some non-essential personnel from the region.

So far, the disruptions have been relatively minor, particularly since the US has launched airstrikes against ISIS that allowed the Kurdish military to retake a number of towns. The Kurdish regional government now insists that “oil production in the region remains unaffected.” ISIS, for its part, clearly has an interest in seizing oil fields. The group reportedly controls seven oil fields and two refineries in northern Iraq, as well as a portion of a pipeline running from Kirkuk to the port city of Ceyhan in Turkey. Reports have suggested that ISIS is now selling some 10,000 barrels of oil per day to fund its activities.

So it would make sense that, in an effort to help the Kurds defend themselves, the US might have some concern for an industry that serves as a major driver of development in Kurdistan. But Steve LeVine pushes back against those who believe the American intervention is primarily about protecting that industry. He sees two problems with their argument:

The first is that the Obama administration has steadfastly discouraged ExxonMobil, Chevron and the other companies from working in Kurdistan.

Until recently, it sought to sabotage the region’s efforts to export its oil. The White House’s rationale has been that, to the degree Kurdistan gains de facto financial independence from Baghdad, the less likely that Iraq will hold together as a country. On Twitter, Middle East energy expert Robin Mills has been among those pushing against the it’s-about-oil theory. A second problem is Obama himself—he is fixated on renewable energy and opposed to oil. When he has embraced oil, such as shale, Obama has done so reluctantly and often in order to placate the fossil fuels industry and its advocates. There may be rational speculation surrounding the role of oil in former George W. Bush’s original assault on Iraq, but there is little likelihood that it featured on Obama’s list of reasons to bomb ISIL.

Yishai Schwartz agrees that the all-about-oil argument, though “seductive”, is also reductive:

It seems likely that the decades of U.S. involvement and the vast web of American relationships in the region—both of which have a great deal to do with oil—play a role in making Americans more viscerally concerned with the region and its people. In that sense, our humanitarian impulse in this conflict is quite likely connected to oil, albeit in a distant and complex way. But that is a long chain and a nuanced argument, to which the “Obama is worried about the world’s oil supply” thesis bears very little resemblance. So where does this conviction come from? Perhaps it’s cynicism borne of past experience: Oil has played a major role in Western interventions in the Middle East, often with disastrous results. But we shouldn’t assume that every statesman is Henry Kissinger or every action is a new Suez operation. The colonialist paradigm is a useful lens for historians, but when it becomes an ideological commitment for the political commenter, it’s simply another set of blinders.

Schwartz gets it exactly right here. Nobody doubts that petroleum, its ubiquity in the modern economy, and our dependence on it factor heavily into American foreign policy; it is, after all, the only reason we’ve been allied for 70 years with the Saudis, a regime whose values, interests, and activities contradict our own at every turn. It’s right and necessary to acknowledge how damaging petro-politics can be and to worry about our government being beholden to the whims of despotic rentier states. I’m not a huge Thomas Friedman fan, but he’s right to harp on this point as he has done periodically for years.

But the presence of oil interests in Iraq does not ipso facto preclude the possibility that American policy there might also be guided by something else. I used to buy into the theory that the 2003 Iraq invasion was about oil, and as LeVine mentions, it was likely part of the equation, but then so were the domestic politics of the War on Terror and a settling of scores between the Bush family and Saddam Hussein. A conspiracy-minded focus on any of these drivers obscures the key fact that the war was driven by an ideology – the neoconservative theory that democracy can be exported by force – that is dangerous in and of itself and whose promulgators have yet to exit the public sphere despite having been pretty conclusively proven wrong. So by all means, let’s talk about the oil, but let’s not mislead ourselves that it’s all about oil.

Water, on the other hand, might really be what it’s all about:

Mosul is not the only dam for which IS has fought. After taking large parts of Iraq in a campaign that started in Mosul, the country’s second largest city, in June, on August 1st IS battled to take control of Haditha dam on the Euphrates in the eastern province of al-Anbar. The fighters were repelled by Iraqi troops and Sunni tribes, but reports suggest the offensive continues.

IS may want to control these resources in order to bolster its claim to run a state. But it may have additional motives. Baghdad and southern Iraq rely on water being released from these dams. So IS could cut off the water, limiting flows to Baghdad and the south or, conversely, release large amounts that could cause floods (although this would also flood areas controlled by IS, including Mosul city, south of the dam). Any change in water flows would also affect the availability of food, because Iraq is heavily dependent on irrigation to grow wheat, barley, rice, corn and fruit and vegetables.

I’m at a loss for why people aren’t freaking out about this a whole lot more.