ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, POLITICS Comments turned off

Hillary Clinton’s Blackout America The reality of heavy reliance on wind and solar is huge costs and frequent failures. By Rupert Darwall

Posted By on October 22nd, 2016

Three presidential debates in which there was only one question on the subject that, more than any other, would transform America under Hillary Clinton. “We can be the 21st-century clean-energy superpower and create millions of new jobs and businesses,” the Democratic nominee declared during the second debate. Does she really think that? Does she even know what she really thinks?

Privately, Mrs. Clinton is as close as you can get to an energy realist in a party completely in hock to the environmental movement. She wants to defend fracking and natural gas, but daren’t in public. As the WikiLeaks hack reveals, she tells a blue-collar audience that environmentalist activists should get a life, but doesn’t tell them that to their faces. “The honeymoon won’t last ten minutes,” green activist Bill McKibben warned earlier this week, threatening to redouble the green onslaught on her from November 9.

In truth, McKibben and his allies have already won. Whatever she thinks, Clinton is a prisoner of her public positions. She promises to install half a billion solar panels by 2020, a sevenfold increase from today, and has set a target to generate one-third of America’s electricity from renewable sources by 2027. It would mean that the U.S. would beat the EU’s 27 percent target by three years and six percentage points.

This is an absurdly vast challenge. Even the Europeans have soured on the costs and immense practical difficulties of integrating unreliable wind and solar into the grid. The benefits of Mrs. Clinton’s plan would flow mostly to China — eight of the top ten manufacturers of solar photovoltaic panels last year were Chinese. Its costs would fall on Americans in the form of spiraling electricity bills, a large part of which would go to pay for grid-management tools to reduce the risk of blackouts, and even these may not work very well.

A case in point: South Australia, where coal-fired power stations have been replaced with wind farms. Forty percent of its electricity comes from renewable energy — and the state has the most expensive electricity in Australia. When, earlier this year, the last coal-fired power station was taken off-line, South Australians were warned they were heading into uncharted waters. “There’s an increased level of risk that we haven’t seen anywhere in the world,” Matthew Warren, chief executive of the Australian Energy Council, said last May.

Four months later, South Australians learned what that meant. During a heavy storm on September 28, a cascade of events occurring within 12 seconds — faults on transmission towers, a consequent sudden reduction in output from six wind farms, which shut down to prevent damage, whereupon the interconnector from neighboring Victoria shut down as well — led to the collapse of the system, plunging the state into a blackout.

Renewables apologists said the weather and the transmission towers were the cause, with climate scientist Professor Will Steffen of the Australian National University blaming climate change for contributing to increased storm intensity. “This is a prelude to a disturbing future. And it’s only going to get worse if we don’t address climate change,” he said. As Australian blogger Joanne Nova explains, “A stable grid needs ‘synchronous inertia’ — big reliable turbines that drive at near constant speeds. Coal turbines are 600 tons and spin at 3,000 rpm. That’s inertia.”

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Israeli Researchers Discover Why Cancer Recurs – And Fight Back By Einat Paz-Frankel

Posted By on October 22nd, 2016

Even with today’s safer and more targeted anti-cancer drugs, scientists have been unable to satisfactorily explain the phenomenon of why treated cancers so often recur. The common theory is that the cancer cell develops internal resistance to treatment, and overrides the toxic effects of the drug.

Now, a team of Israeli scientists provide the key for reducing recurrence, allowing anti-cancer drugs to do work as intended.

Led by Prof. Yuval Shaked of the Technion-Israel Institute, the study shows that tumor relapse occurs when the body, in effect, mobilizes itself in favor of the tumor, causing recurrence of the disease, increasing its aggressiveness and creating metastases (tumor spread). Even selective, highly focused treatments that almost exclusively harm cancer cells lead to a similar response.

“The administration of an anti-cancer drug is very aggressive intervention in the body,” Shaked said in a statement. “Therefore, the body responds to chemotherapy the way it responds to trauma. This creates the effect of a double-edged sword: although chemotherapy kills cancer cells, it also causes the secretion of substances that confer resistance to the tumor.”

The study, which was recently published in the scientific publication The Journal of Pathology, mice with multiple myeloma – a malignant disease of the plasma cells produced in bone marrow and spread throughout the body – were treated with the selective anti-cancer drug Velcade (bortezomib). Velcade is based on the discovery of ubiquitin, for which professors Avram Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover of the Technion won the Nobel Prize (along with the late American biologist Irwin Rose) in 2004.

Shaked found that treatment with Velcade led to a physiological reaction that actually reinforced the intensity of the myeloma in the mice. According to Shaked, the drug caused inflammatory cells in the bone marrow to enhance the aggressiveness of the disease and provide the cancer cells with resistance to treatment. Still, “treatment with Velcade is essential and necessary,” says Shaked, “but its disadvantage is that along with the benefit there is damage.”

Next steps: Inhibiting the mechanism that enhances the tumor

Understanding the mechanisms that enhance the tumor and accelerate the spread of metastases “will enable us to develop methods to inhibit them,” he stresses. In fact, when the researchers inhibited the secreted factor related to the activity of inflammatory cells, they observed a decrease in the proliferation of cancer cells. Now, they are working on various ways to inhibit the body’s response to anti-cancer treatments.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Clinton’s Pretense That She Didn’t Understand ‘C’ Was for ‘Classified’ For mishandling ‘top secret’ information and lying about it, she should be prosecuted. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on October 22nd, 2016

So now Hillary finally knows what the “(C)” stands for in government documents: It’s Cartwright . . . as in four-star Marine General James E. Cartwright, the retired 67-year-old former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the expendable federal official against whom laws protecting classified information actually get enforced.

(C), see? Oh wait — sorry. I don’t mean to confuse Mrs. Clinton by starting this second paragraph with “(C)”. After all, as she diva-’splained to the FBI, she could only “speculate” that “(C)” must have something to do with organizing paragraphs “in alphabetical order.” Speculation was necessary, she said, apparently with a straight face, because she didn’t really know what “(C)” meant.

The question arose because the “(C)” designation — applicable to classified information at the confidential level — turned up in at least one of Clinton’s personal e-mails. Those would be the e-mails that, she repeatedly insisted, never, ever contained classified information. Or at least, that’s what she insisted until government agencies confessed that hundreds of the e-mails do contain classified information. Then Clinton’s “never, ever” tale morphed into the more narrowly tailored lie that there were no e-mails “marked classified.” Alas, that claim could not withstand examination of the e-mails, during which the “(C)” markings were found . . . whereupon the explanation underwent more, shall we say, refining. Thus the final, astonishing claim that she didn’t know what the markings meant, along with the laugh-out-loud whopper that maybe it was all about alphabetical order.

Yeah, that’s the ticket!

In case you’re keeping score: When a person being prosecuted for a crime changes her story multiple times, as if she were playing Twister (kids, ask your parents), the prosecutor gets to prove each of the evolving lies at the trial. As you’d imagine, juries grasp that the truth doesn’t need an editor. That’s why people whose explanations can’t keep up with the evidence are pretty much a lock to get convicted.

But that’s when it’s “(C)” as in Cartwright, not Clinton.

General Cartwright pled guilty this week to making false statements to FBI agents who were investigating his mishandling of classified information. The general admits to falsely concealing his communications with two journalists. They involved “Stuxnet,” a covert American–Israeli operation to infect the computer systems that controlled Iran’s main nuclear-enrichment facility. The information was top secret, regarding a crucial program. Its exposure caused diplomatic problems and threatens our spy agencies’ relationships with foreign intelligence services, which are based on the ability to keep secrets secret.

Still, compared with Clinton, Cartwright is a piker. As the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin reports, Cartwright appears to have been a “confirming” source. That is, reporters from the New York Times and of Newsweek already had the Stuxnet intelligence (from some other leaker whom the administration has not prosecuted). Cartwright merely acknowledged the information’s accuracy — and, he says, only after it had appeared in published news reports. His claimed purpose was to prevent additional intelligence from being published to the detriment of our national security. This does not excuse his conduct, but it may go a long way toward explaining why the Justice Department charged only a felony false-statement count, not a classified-information offense.

Clinton, by contrast, willfully set up a homebrew e-mail system. Given that the secretary of state’s duties preponderantly involve intelligence matters, this made it inevitable that classified information would unlawfully be transmitted and stored on non-secure servers (i.e., outside the multi-layered protection of the government’s classified communications system). Thus did the FBI find, for example, that of the 110 e-mails on Clinton’s non-secure system that were — contrary to her claims — classified at the time she sent or received them, eight involved top-secret information.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Michael Galak :Tyranny Loves an Empty Holster

Posted By on October 22nd, 2016

“By its Second Amendment, Americans have ensured that they will never be short of the means to defend their freedom from tyrants, foreign invaders, terrorists or criminals.Fanciful, you think, no threat to democracy could possibly arise on our quiet, law-abiding shores. Quite possibly so — and let us hope it is. Then again, a Jewish shopkeeper in 1930 Berlin probably shared the same opinion.”

Much of last week was dominated by charge and counter-charge concerning deals allegedly struck to legalise a seven-shot shotgun, the weapon’s opponents seeing it as a tool of mayhem and terror. Be that as it may, a gun serves the purpose of the person who holds it, good or bad.
Many surprises await the traveller in the US of A. However, no matter how much one expects to be dazzled amazed or stunned, no catalyst for instant culture shock can compete with the variety of guns and ammo offered for sale. Openly, even in some supermarkets. I still have a supermarket flyer, kept as a souvenir, which advertises a selection of rifles and pistols with the appropriate ammo for all.

It took me almost a week to stop looking for concealed guns everywhere, wondering who might be packing an equalizer. My fearful imagination battled thoughts that I might at any moment be caught up in the homicidal rampage of a mad gunman. Eventually I started to relax. And think. And talk to the armed citizens our foreign correspondents unvaryingly depict in their dispatches as symptoms of US society’s collective insanity. Casting aside preconceptions was a good start because, gradually, I came to understand that Americans view their right to bear arms in a somewhat different context than we Australians think they do. However, there are also some intriguing similarities, which, to me, signify a certain degree of an emotional affinity and conceptual confluence on the subject of gun control.

But first, just for some context, let me recall a bus trip I took with my wife in 1981 from Melbourne to Uluru (then still known as Ayers Rock). Ah, memories of a nose caked with red dust and those jarring, corrugated roads come flooding back! Likewise the spectacle of my fellow, full-to-burst passengers jiggling like a mob of St.Vitus Dance patients as they waited in line at the coyly named “comfort stops” along the way. One overnight stop was Coober Pedy, an unruly opal town where life has gone underground to escape the withering heat. We went to a supermarket, mostly because it was the only air-conditioned sanctuary that wasn’t a pub or a church. It was in that supermarket where an astonishing spectacle stopped me in my tracks.

Neatly stacked on easy-to-reach shelves, row upon row of red gelignite sticks and spools of fuse by the metre. It was a revelation — high explosives for sale just down the aisle from the lettuce and cheese. More than that, explosives in an Australian supermarket were treated as a fact of life. Nobody was shocked, surprised or outraged. Me neither, when I thought about it.

Now, let’s get back to Americans’ alleged “fascination” with guns, which isn’t the right word at all. Like Coober Pedy miners and their off-the-shelf high explosives, the Americans with whom I spoke accepted guns as a fact of life. Underpinning this was the conviction that the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the right to bear arms isn’t something bizarre, outlandish or provocative. Rather — and this is what Australians find hard to grasp — many felt it was a civic responsibility. When I heard that, I asked what kind of responsibility? To kill anyone you do not like? The response was hearty, indulgent laughter. Gently, I was advised to read the Second Amendment, which I did. Pasted it below, please do read it.

second amend

I had always sided with those who advocated a complete ban on weapons. I also accepted as an axiom that the gun ownership means crime, injury and the deaths of innocents. Every time a mass shooting occurred, whether here or abroad, I was distressed, thinking I or someone I love could have been at the wrong place at the wrong time. The closest I have come to being a victim was at the time of the Hoddle Street massacre. I was on my way to work, close to the stretch of busy Melbourne inner-city road that Julian Knight had selected as his killing ground. I heard the news and was shocked. But amidst my thoughts and concern for Knight’s victims, in the back of my mind were the words of the Second Amendment.

I thought, ‘Hang on, the Second Amendment says nothing of the right to shoot innocents or to rob banks — nothing of the sort.’ All it says is that Mr. and Mrs. American Citizen have the right to form militias and bear arms to protect both their democracy and freedom. The Second Amendment also implies that the maintenance of collective and individual freedom is the right and responsibility of the citizenry, and it likewise countenances the possibility that recourse to arms might be required to achieve as much. Those who misuse the right enshrined in the Second Amendment are criminals and the law takes care of them — or rather, should take care of them. This simple chain of reasoning changed the way I thought and felt about guns in private citizens’ hands. Who knows, had their victims had guns and thus were able to defend themselves, Julian Knight and Martin Bryant might not have slaughtered so many. Who knows how many victims of law-breakers and killers might still be alive.

POLITICS Comments turned off

‘Rigged?’ 5 Ways the Election Is Under Attack By J. Christian Adams

Posted By on October 22nd, 2016

“Is the November election rigged? Certainly not in the way you might have thought it was. The election is afflicted with something far more dangerous than a single plot to flip the outcome. The affliction is diffuse, decentralized, and funded by millions of dollars.”

Donald Trump gaslighted the left when he suggested the upcoming elections may be “rigged.” The usual comic trove of Democrats posing as academics, journalists, and civil rights groups pounced on Trump. It’s a revived “Southern strategy” that tars “Democrats as cheaters,” wailed Rutgers professor Lorraine Minnite.

Democrats as cheaters? You mean Democrats like Wendy Rosen, Melowese Richardson, and Lessadolla Sowers?

Whether Trump was correct or not depends on the meaning of “rigged.” If “rigged” means a group of Democrats sit in central command and control the output of voting machines from outer space, then no, the election isn’t rigged.

But what Democrats are really doing is far more dangerous, far more diffuse, and far harder to fix than a conspiracy to control voting machines.

The integrity of our elections is suffering from a coordinated, multi-million dollar attack on multiple fronts. It’s far more complicated than one centralized high-powered conspiracy to “rig” the election. A more sophisticated understanding of what is happening is essential to combat the real threat to our elections.

Here are five ways that the integrity of elections are under attack:

Big money organizations fight against election integrity

Large brick-and-mortar organizations with multi-million dollar endowments are fighting to undermine the integrity of American elections. These organizations, such as Project Vote, Demos, the ACLU, Advancement Project, and the League of Women Voters have vast financial resources. They have used these resources in key states such as Ohio, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and elsewhere to attack election integrity measures. They bring attacks against Voter ID laws, but they also bring more important efforts, such as attacks against citizenship verification.

I’d wager that more votes are cast in American elections by ineligible aliens than by those impersonating voters.

Citizenship verification is essential. Naturally, groups like the NAACP and ACLU do absolutely nothing about alien voting, except whatever they can to ensure that barriers to illegal voting are struck down in court.

I am involved in litigation across the country to help election integrity. In one lawsuit in a swing state, we discovered that non-citizens were voting illegally in presidential elections. This is both a federal and state felony. When we asked the election supervisor for records showing referral to law enforcement officials, none existed — because no referral was ever made. Never mind that dozens and dozens of aliens were participating in the election process in just one county. Imagine how many participate statewide. Yet nothing was done to prosecute the illegal voting — so word spreads through the community that illegal voting is a hobby that goes unpunished.

Rigged?

These same big money organizations send swarms of lawyers to the smallest court hearings, so many that sometimes there isn’t enough room for them in the courtroom.

A comic scene unfolded in another case I was involved in — an attack on the Election Assistance Commission by a swarm of leftist groups. The federal agency issued rules allowing states to use a federal voter registration form that incorporated state citizenship verification requirements.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Kerry: ‘It Pisses Me Off’ That Climate Change Got Left Out of Presidential Debates By Bridget Johnson see note please

Posted By on October 22nd, 2016

Don’t be mad dummie….Al Goreon is now advising Hillary and her agenda will be as green as her ill gotten cash…..rsk

Secretary of State John Kerry admitted “it pisses me off” that climate change wasn’t brought up in the presidential debates.

On a panel with Leonardo DiCaprio after a Thursday screening at UN headquarters in New York of the actor’s documentary “Before the Flood,” Kerry said that “maybe November 8th will produce a capacity for the entire Republican caucus” to see the global-warming film.

“It should be required for every single one of them,” he added, to applause from the audience.

Kerry emphasized that “we’re not sitting here chasing some pie-in-the-sky set of possible solutions somewhere down the road.”

“The solutions are here now. Every single one of them is staring us in the face. We know what we have to do. The solution to climate change is energy policy. And if we will make the right choices and everybody here exponentially grown around the planet starts to push the politicians, as the film said, then they won’t dare be against it as the populations begin to demand different sources of electricity, different sources of — of transportation, and so forth,” he said.

Kerry argued that climate-change activists “will be able to win the battle of sending a message to people about how we account for the true costs, about what our opportunities are for a new energy base for our nation, how we will be able to do transportation and meet all of our obligations.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

Clinton Thug Robert Creamer Planned Obamacare in Jail By Daniel John Sobieski

Posted By on October 22nd, 2016

Robert Creamer, founder and partner of Democracy Partners, the group behind the organized violence at Trump rallies, as shown in the video by James O’Keefe and Project Veritas, is no ordinary agitator. Creamer, a convicted felon, is arguably the spiritual godfather of ObamaCarre and much of the current progressive left agenda.

Creamer, along with his wife, Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky is no stranger to agitation, violence, and expanding the progressive agenda. As Investor’s Business Daily pointed out in March 5, 2010 editorial regarding protests against House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski over the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988, which expanded Medicare benefits and funded the change with a supplemental tax:

An interesting historical footnote is that leading the protest against Rostenkowski was Jan Schakowsky — then Director of the Illinois State Council of Senior Citizens -– and currently Democratic representative from the Ninth Congressional District of Illinois, and chief deputy whip to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It was Schakowshy’s husband, Robert Creamer, a Huffington Post blogger, who wrote what is arguably the bible of current health care reform efforts, Stand-Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, while serving a prison term for check kiting.

As Breitbart has reported, Creamer, in addition to being the inspiration for ObamaCare, was also involved in heavily promoting the Iran nuclear deal, which effectively removed all impediments to Iran becoming a nuclear power and in providing $150 billion for this state sponsor of terror to foment revolution targeted against Israel and American interests:

Creamer, a political consultant who is intimately connected with Obama’s inner political circle, pleaded guilty in 2005 to tax violations and bank fraud. He served time in a federal prison and was under house arrest. After finishing his sentence, Creamer worked for Obama’s presidential campaign, training organizers.

As Breitbart News first exposed in 2009, Creamer used his prison time to work on a political manual: Listen to Your Mother: Stand Up Straight! How Progressives Can Win. In it, he devised a strategy to guide a future “progressive” president. His plan included implementing “universal health care” as a first step to other radical reforms, including amnesty for illegal aliens. Obama strategist David Axelrod called the book “a blueprint for future victories.”…

The Wall Street Journal reports that Creamer advocated for the Iran deal with the help of the Ploughshares Fund, a pro-Iran organization.

According to a transcript of the [Ploughshares] call reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, participants stressed that the Iran agreement was the most important of the Obama administration’s second term, and they needed to prepare for battle with Republicans.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey’s Wars By Stephen Bryen and Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on October 22nd, 2016

Turkish air and ground forces are attacking northern Syria. The target is not ISIS – the presumed threat to Turkish interests – but rather Kurdish forces that have borne the brunt of anti-ISIS ground fighting and are key to the battle for Mosul in Iraq.

Since the July aborted coup in Ankara, the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been making internal war against what it calls the “Gülenist threat,” followers of Turkish cleric Fetullah Gülen, who Erdoğan believes engineered the coup. Tens of thousands of Turks have been arrested, dismissed from their jobs, and otherwise harassed. Turkey has also been conducting an external war – either overtly or by proxy – to control sensitive areas of Iraq and Syria and short-circuit any possibility of Kurdish independence or large-scale autonomy emerging from the wreckage of wars in both those countries.

After shelling Kurdish positions just north of Aleppo, the Turkish Air Force bombed headquarters, ammunition dumps, and shelters. Turkish sources claimed 200 dead; Kurdish sources said 10 people were killed. They were PKK, said the Turks – members of the Peoples Workers Party, which has carried out operations inside Turkey for decades. The People’s Protection Units (YPG), however, said in a statement that the airstrikes targeted fighters from the YPG-affiliated Jaish al-Thuwar (Revolutionary Front), which was advancing against ISIS in the city of Ifrin.

Turkey makes little distinction among Kurdish groups. The U.S. takes a different tack, agreeing that the PKK is a terrorist organization but arming and training the YPG and finding it the most effective force on the ground fighting ISIS. A U.S. official says the particular Kurds targeted this time were not among those we have trained, so there were no Americans in the area of Turkish fire. This time. But the possibility of direct U.S.-Turkish confrontation is rising daily.

There has been little mention of Turkey’s wars in the American press, aided by the fact that militias, rebel armies, terrorist groups, and sub-state actors sound like alphabet soup: FSA, PKK, PYD, YPG, JAN, ISIS, AQI, and more fight in Syria and Iraq. Even when they have names, Americans are likely to find themselves confused. How does Jaish al-Thuwar relate to the Khalid ibn al-Walid Brigade, or the Free Syrian Army or the Authenticity and Development Group, the Sun Battalion, the Al-Qousi Brigade, or the Truthful Promise Brigade?

Confusion is serving Turkey well.

BOOKS Comments turned off

A Non-Politically Correct Bookshelf ****

Posted By on October 22nd, 2016

Please indulge me while I “toot” my horn. Over the years I have produced a dozen or so novels that touch on current events and even anticipate them. They are about Islam, cultural and political corruption, and frauds perpetrated on the citizens and the country by our self-appointed elite. Here are synopses of their plots. They are all available as printed books, on Kindle, and also as Audible versions.

I begin with the earliest series I had finished, self-published on Amazon, because no mainstream publisher would touch it. It stars Merritt Fury, an American entrepreneur and maverick capitalist who invariably runs afoul of the political and financial establishments in America and abroad. The first title, Whisper the Guns, is set in Hong Kong. But the most relevantly violent one is the second title, We Three Kings, in which Fury is targeted for death by a Saudi sheik with the approving nod of our State Department. Sound familiar? The sheik gets his comeuppance by story’s end, with Fury holding the sheik’s feet and other body parts to the fire. I boldly adopted the Saudi royal emblem for the cover. No outrage from the Riyadh medievalists yet.

Another series, published by Perfect Crime Books in Baltimore, Maryland features a detective hero, Chess Hanrahan, who specializes in solving moral paradoxes. In Presence of Mind Hanrahan encounters and engages in a contest of wits with two denizens of the State Department, who subscribe to the policy of “cognitive dissonance,” in order to put across a disastrous “peace” treaty with the Soviet Union. Wishing hard enough for a preferred result will make it so. Hanrahan jolts the celebrated denizens back to reality in the worst possible ways. In With Distinction, he investigates a murder in the philosophy department of a Midwest university (based on Michigan State University), and uncovers a snake pit of plots to grant illiteracy and ignorance the highest academic honors, and to rid the department of a reason-oriented philosophy professor. Sound familiar?

The Hanrahan and Fury novels were composed and finished in the mid-1980s. Their plots were extrapolations of the political and cultural conditions of the time. I had no sense then that things would grow much worse. Political correctness in speech and written forms was not yet a ubiquitous term of derogation of enforced conformity – although Marxists and feminists were hard at work to impose PC, often successfully – while such concepts as “safe places,” “white privilege,” and “trigger warnings” would have caused even the leftist professors in academia to guffaw in laughter.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Mosul Offensive’s Many Unknowns By:Srdja Trifkovic |

Posted By on October 22nd, 2016

The much-heralded offensive against ISIS in Mosul by the Iraqi army, Kurdish Peshmerga and Shiite militias may succeed in capturing Iraq’s second largest city. It is unlikely to result in the destruction of the Islamic State’s fighting capacity, however. It is even less likely to lead to the establishment of stable and permanent government control over Iraq’s Sunni Triangle, which has Mosul at its northern tip.

The importance of Mosul is clear. It is a major population center of over two million (before the war) and the pivot that intersects the east-west line of communication from the Syrian border to the north-south axis that leads to Baghdad, 250 miles to the south. The first question, which has not been adequately considered in mainstream media reports, concerns the battle readiness of government forces. In June 2014 the Iraqi army collapsed and fled without a fight when ISIS attacked Mosul, although it was vastly superior to the attackers in numbers and equipment. The high command in Baghdad was unable to maintain any semblance of command and control, even though the U.S. had spent some 20 billion dollars on arming, training and equipping it in preceding years. Its mostly Shiite soldiers were uninterested in fighting for Sunni-majority areas which they did not regard as their own. It was unable to develop any sense of loyalty or common purpose among its non-Shia recruits, who deserted en masse.

It is unclear what if anything has changed over the past two years and four months to shift the balance. The personnel, equipment, training and doctrine are still largely the same. Early signs were not encouraging. On the first day of the current offensive it took the Iraqi army six hours of fierce combat to push back a platoon-sized IS unit from Ibrahim Khalil, a village 20 miles south of Mosul. The jihadists came back and retook the village during the night: “No reinforcements showed up so when they attacked we had to retreat from the five villages we captured on Tuesday. We ended up right back where we started,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Mohammed Hadi. “We took back three today but we can’t advance further towards Mosul until the others arrive.” This episode bodes ill for the future of a complex operation which requires precise planning and coordination. Subsequent army claims of battlefield successes, such as the taking of the city of Bartella on October 21, may reflect the unwillingness of ISIS to give battle in open plains south of the city where its fighters would be at an obvious disadvantage.