Author: Jason Ditz

ISIS is facing growing criticism for its use of cluster monitions in its ongoing war in Iraq and Syria. The complaints, interestingly enough, began with allegations that Syria’s government was the one using the “banned” munitions, and was treated in a similar negative light.

Both ISIS and the Assad government are “bad guys” and so predictably their use of the munitions was going to be treated as beyond the pale. Yet the problem of cluster munition use is much older and wider-spread than just Syria/ISIS, and rarely gets treated as an important situation, or even a problem.

The US military heavily used cluster bombs during both the Iraq and Afghan wars, causing massive civilian casualties. The Israeli military littered southern Lebanon with munitions during their most recent war there, with unexploded ordinance continuing to kill Lebanese civilians to this day.

The US has similarly ignored the “ban” on cluster munitions use with a massive export of such bombs to Saudi Arabia only last year.

Cluster munitions have proven a huge humanitarian problem, killing civilians years after the war they were used in is over. Yet the ISIS use of such weapons is hardly out of keeping with international norms, and the problem of cluster bombs spans the globe. It is a mistake to treat ISIS as unusually bad for using such weapons when the US does so casually and with impunity, and has a stockpile of such weapons that far, far exceeds anything ISIS could ever dream of looting from what warehouses it has.

The Obama Admniistration has for months been railing against Russian “interference” because the Russian Federation has been advocating a federal system in Ukraine as a way of increasing regional autonomy in the face of secessionist rebellions.

Never let it be said they won’t be openly hypocritical.

Vice President Joe Biden penned an entire op-ed today in which he pushed for a federal system to be declared in Iraq, and that the US would “help” Iraq in implementing it.

The US efforts is the mirror of the Russian effort, trying to satisfy its allied factions in the nation while tamping down a civil war that those factions are likely to lose.

Somewhat lost in the first-hand account of last week’s helicopter crash by NY Times reporter Alissa Rubin, who was injured in the incident, was a potentially important revelation about the attacks on the Iraqi Yazidi minority.

The pilot really made a big impression. You know, the Yazidis feel so betrayed by the Arab neighbors they had lived among for so many years; they all turned on the Yazidis when ISIS came. Many of the atrocities were carried out not by the militants but by their own neighbors.

The focus in the story is on the pilot, himself a Sunni Arab from the region, trying to save his neighbor Yazidis even as others had turned on them. That’s important, without a doubt, but ignores the more important point, that ISIS didn’t actually carry out many of the attacks on the Yazidis.

So to sum up, President Obama started a war to save 40,000 trapped Yazidis from ISIS, and there weren’t 40,000 of them, and they weren’t trapped, and now it turns out ISIS also wasn’t nearly so involved as previously indicated. America was lied into the first Iraq War in 2003 on some mightly flimsy pretexts, but it seems the administration didn’t learn any of the lessons, even bad lessons like keeping your lies less transparent, and the whole pretext collapsed in just over a week. The war, however, will go on much, much longer.

Early today we reported, on the basis of reports from other media outlets and a confirmation by Nineveh Governor Atheel Nujaifi, that the Mosul Dam, the largest hydroelectric dam in Iraq, was seized by ISIS from Kurdish forces. The following image appears to have been the basis of the story.

Liz Sly from the Washington Post was the first to suggest the story may not have been true, showing photos taken earlier in the day of Deputy Kurdish Premier Qubad Talabani at a conspicuously unconquered Mosul Dam.

Eventually, someone on Twitter “confessed” to having fabricated the original image, and provided an identical photo, same shadows and same angle, without the guy or the tiny little ISIS flag on top of the dam. Even the cloud passing by and the shadows are the same.

We don’t claim to know the truth about what’s going on at the Mosul Dam any more than anyone else, but this underscores a need to be increasingly skeptical about the stories coming out of the area. This is particularly true of stories emerging from Kurdistan (where the governor had fled), as the Kurdistan government is openly lobbying the US into a war against ISIS, and may push false narratives that advance that effort.

Over the weekend, Professor David Bernstein penned an article for the Washington Post accusing the media of “journalistic malpractice” for using Gaza Health Ministry figures on civilian deaths in the Israeli onslaught, insisting they were inflated. And I quote

Contrary to early reports that 80% or so of the early casualties were civilians, Al-Jazeera published names and ages, and about 3/4 were men of fighting age (16-50), compared to a rough estimate of 20% of the Gazan population (40% to 50% of which is fourteen and under). Some of those men were undoubtedly civilians, but it strains credulity to believe that 80% of the casualties were civilian but just-so-happened to be overwhelmingly fighting-age men.

Does it strain credulity? Not at all. Let’s go to the mother of all civilian-centric incidents in recent history, 9/11, and do a similar calculation of the “military-aged” victims among the 2,977 slain there. Since this is America, and women are in the military here too, we’ll count both just to be fair. We’ll also use Bernstein’s age group of 16-50, even though 50-year-old men in blockaded Palestine probably aren’t really healthy enough to still be fighting.

We go to CNN’s memorial, sort by age, do a little math and we get:

2,500 “military-aged” / 2,977 victims = 84%.

84% of the victims of 9/11 were “military-aged,” but would it “strain credulity” to say they were overwhelmingly civilians when census data shows “military-aged” Americans only account for a hair over 40% of the overall population? Of course not!

In fact, there’s a very good reason that “military-aged” people, by which we really mean “able-bodied” people, are disproportionately hit in such incidents. It’s because those people are more active, out and doing stuff. Israel is leveling a lot of houses full of children in Gaza, but the deaths are doubtless primarily from people who are out-of-doors hit by shrapnel, and able-bodied people are more apt to be out-of-doors, especially mid-war.

Professor Bernstein seems to be trying to imply that “military-aged” is tantamount to an antonym for “innocent civilians.” As a law professor he surely knows that is not the case, yet efforts to gloss over the humanitarian calamity of the Gaza war is getting the better of common sense for many people.

Orchestrating a military coup against a demcoratically elected government, leading a junta that killed thousands of protesters and has sentenced many more to death for organizing those protests, Egypt’s incoming president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is worried people think he’s “too soft,” and gave a harsh statement on his incoming regime in a television interview and leaked comments associated with it.

“I’m not leaving a chance for people to act on their own,” Sisi declared, going on to promise he would forcibly turn Egypt into a “first-class nation.”

“People think I’m a soft man. Sisi is torture and suffering,” declared Sisi, who among other things, vowed to send troops to people’s houses to install energy efficient lightbulbs as a way of solving the nation’s fuel shortage.

Sisi styles himself as a paternal autocrat, and seems to view Egypt’s economic problems as personal failings on the part of individuals, promising longer work days and less pay as a path to modernity. “I will not sleep and neither will you,” he vowed in the interview.

It should go without saying after killing thousands of people, but Sisi promised he will brook no dissent, saying that the people who oppose his ban on public protests “want to destroy Egypt.” Terrifyingly, while being straightforward about his intentions, Sisi remains something of a media darling in the US, as a “tough on terror” strongman.