Russia prepares to defend Crimea

The Russian military has announced the delivery of new air defence missiles to Crimea, in a move scheduled before the latest tension with Ukraine.

Ukraine prepars to "defend" itself

Tensions between Russia and Ukraine are continuing to rise after an incident was reported over the weekend in which an attempted group of infiltrators from Ukraine entered Crimea, killing a Russian soldier and a member of their FSB security service. Russia has blamed the Ukrainian government’s spy agency, calling it a prelude to terror attacks on key infrastructure.
Residents reported yesterday that Ukraine had begun massing soldiers along the Crimean border, and today President Petro Poroshenko reported that he had placed the army on “combat alert” over the issue, with other Ukrainian officials claiming a full-scale war could began “at any minute.”

A call for calm

Putin pledged a “very serious” response as he blamed Kiev for pursuing “terror” activities. The 28-member bloc called on both sides to refrain from intensifying what has led to the worst diplomatic standoff between the two countries since a 2015 truce eased hostilities in Ukraine’s separatist conflict.

So why now?

Ukraine's leaders need to distract

Russia is at war with Ukraine — there is no concealing this basic fact. Yet despite the seriousness of the threat from the East, Moscow isn’t the worst enemy the Ukrainians face. Given the self-inflicted corruption that has infected every facet of business and government, the country’s worst enemy may be its own leaders.
Ukraine’s corruption was inherited from the dying Soviet Union and has persisted for two and a half decades. It has made the country into a brutal kleptocracy that hands power and wealth to a tiny and unassailable elite, impeding the development of a normal economy. It has warped society, ruining everything from the health care and education systems to law enforcement and the judiciary. This is a system where the drunken son of an oligarch can walk free if he happens to run over an ordinary citizen with his car....
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden has spent the past year begging the government to send a signal by sending at least one corrupt oligarch to jail. Just one. But even his pleas have fallen on deaf ears. Kiev’s inattention to the concerns of a largely sympathetic international community is an extremely troubling development that could cost Ukraine support from abroad when it needs it the most.
Unfortunately, Ukraine’s leaders appear to have made a dangerous miscalculation by assuming that the West regards their country as its proxy in a confrontation with an aggressively resurgent Russia. For this reason, they assume they can count on support in Western capitals no matter what happens. A former senior minister, in government until April, described the official mindset as follows: “They believe that Ukraine is too important for America and the European Union to allow it to fail. I think that’s completely delusional. I think Ukraine has this year in which to show real results. The U.S. and other friends of Ukraine are losing patience.”

Speaking of corruption, Iraq

Defense Minister Khaled al-Obeidi and parliament speaker Salim al-Jabouri last week exchanged accusations of bribery over defense contracts, leading to judicial investigations and sparking concerns that the offensive could be delayed.

Iraq;s government is in crisis

The big point I brought home is the profound crisis of the post-2003 political system. The recent Sadrist-led demonstrations in the Green Zone are simply a recognition of the fact that there is a near universal sense across Iraqi public opinion that the state and its ruling elite have completely failed them. The whole non-Kurdish political elite recognize this but does not want to resolve the crisis in a way that will involve limits being placed on their own party political power or their personal ability to financially exploit the Iraqi state.
The Shia members of the ruling elite blame profound corruption for bringing the system to its knees without recognizing their central role in that corruption.
The Sunni Green Zone politicians see the system’s persecution and marginalization of their constituency as the key, without recognizing that ‘their constituency’ does not and probably never has recognized them as its leaders.
The Kurdish politicians see their own internal money worries as a result of the relationship with Baghdad with some recognizing that it is partly the weakness of their own rentier system....
In order not to run out of money the Government of Iraq will have to do a deal in April with the International Monetary Fund which will lead to a cut in the food rationing system, basic commodity price rises, cuts in the government pay roll, cuts in government wages and increased charges for government services.
The most likely outcome of this will be another ‘Iraqi summer.’ A return to Sadrist encouraged, but not controlled, popular protest in the face of a failed reform program, electricity shortages and more stories about the industrial strength corruption that has done so much to undermine public support for the Iraqi state.
I suppose whether Abadi survives as Prime Minister is not really that important, it is whether the Iraqi state can survive and avoid a return to civil war, a war which looks as if it could be fought amongst Shia groups, fighting for what will be left of the Iraqi state.

Dems and Repubs agree on something

Senior officials at U.S. Central Command manipulated intelligence reports, press statements, and congressional testimony to present a more positive outlook on the war against the so-called Islamic State, a House Republican task force concluded in a damning report released Thursday.
The report, written by the members of the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees and the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, confirmed more than a year of reporting by The Daily Beast about problems with CENTCOM analysis of the war against ISIS.
House Democrats, who conducted their own separate investigation, reached a similar conclusion as their Republican colleagues, finding that CENTCOM “insufficiently accommodated dissenting views,” Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement....
The report doesn’t find any evidence that the White House ordered reports to be changed to present a rosier picture.
But Rep. Mike Pompeo, who was part of the task force, said the group believes that there was an unspoken understanding within the administration of how the war against jihadists was going and that drove decision makers within CENTCOM.

Pentagon fighting ISIS with mercenaries now

A no-bid $10 million contract announced in late July is possibly the first instance in which the Pentagon has publicly acknowledged using private military contractors alongside American special operations forces fighting Islamic State in Syria.
In a public announcement on July 27, the Department of Defense said it awarded an intelligence analysis contract to private contractor Six3 Intelligence Solutions, a cyber and signals intelligence and surveillance firm that is a subsidiary of CACI International Inc. The contract will require Six3 to assist US forces working against Islamic State (IS, formerly known as ISIS or ISIL) within Syria.