The Constitutional Implications of Using Drones to Liquidate American Citizens

Stalin liquidated his adversaries in the Lubyanka with a bullet in the back of the head.  This kind of precision strike was perfectly within the law because Stalin, a dictator, determined the KGB's version of 'due process.’  Liquidation of so-called high value targets (individuals) via a bureaucratically defined 'due process’ procedure lies at the center of the US counterterrorism strategy. 

Liquidation is a better descriptor than assassination, because the killing method is based on cold calculation and the targets executed are almost never recognized public officials. This arbitrary character of the US killing strategy is especially true for the detailed inferential procedures*, including those involving the active participation of the President, for identifying and selecting individual targets for termination in the drone strikes. As my longtime friend Jim Stevenson notes below the former Attorney General Eric Holder has gone so far as to justify this by claiming that Constitution only promises “due process,” not due judicial process, when American citizens are targeted for liquidation in the war of terror — the inference being that these complex target picking procedures constitute 'due process.’  

Stevenson’s essay explains why the Obama/Bush liquidation strategy raises fundamental questions of the Constitutionality and the rule of law that transcend the operational needs of the so-called war on terror.

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* The “due process” of "signature targeting" procedures embodies a seductively dangerous form of algorithmic statistical reasoning, where it is assumed a subjectively determined set of “prior indicators” can used to determine the probability of individual being a legitimate terrorist target.  The problem posed by the likelihood of a mistaken identification (known as a “false positive”) is three fold: first, even if the statistical distributions of the priors could be accurately calculated, there is by definition always a probability of a false positive and an innocent person being unintentionally liquidated.  This is know antiseptically as collateral damage, and because we are at war, it is argued, collateral damage is a regrettable but necessary cost of doing buisness.  Second, because the prior indicators are subjectively determined (i.e., hypothesized), their probability distributions are unknowable and indeed have no meaning; therefore the probability of false positives is unknowable and has no meaning.  Third, human targets learn from experience and change their behaviour, making even relevant “prior” indicators irrelevant.  Yet the detailed, deliberative nature of the target selection procedure creates a seductive psychological impression of what Holder claimed is “due process."

Protecting American Citizens From Drones

by James P. Stevenson, Antiwar.com, May 14, 2015

http://original.antiwar.com/James_Stevenson/2015/05/13/protecting-american-citizens-from-drones/

[re-posted with permission of the author]

As America recently learned of the unintended deaths of its citizens from a CIA drone strike, it should reflect on the death warrant issued without due process for two other Americans, one that killed American citizen Anwar al-Awalki, a drone strike that ignored his Constitutional protections and took the life of another American citizen, his son.

When al-Awalki was killed in 2011, former attorney general Eric Holder was criticized for killing him without due process. In response, Holder educated the public that the Constitution promises due process but not judicial process. Additionally, by defining al-Awalki as an imminent threat, he said he could also rely on the government’s police powers to make a lawful killing. Obviously under some circumstances, government officials need to react quickly to kill without due process such as when a student begins shooting other students in school. But these kinds of exigencies were not present with al-Awalki.

The Caroline Test, an international legal test for an “imminent threat,” states that the threat must be “instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” This was not the case for al-Awalki. The government chased al-Awalki for two years in an attempt to kill him proving that as a threat he was far from imminent.

In addition to distorting al-Awalki’s imminence, the Department of Justice justified killing al-Awalki without judicial process by citing the Supreme Court decision, Mathews versus Eldridge, to justify its administrative due process hearing as a replacement for a judicial hearing.

 In fact, the Mathews case was about how much due process one is entitled to in administrative hearings on disability benefits. The Mathews case made it unambiguous that the greater the potential loss of rights, the greater the requirement for judicial as opposed to executive branch due process. Specifically, it said, “the degree of potential deprivation that may be created by a particular decision is a factor to be considered in assessing the validity of any administrative decision-making process.”

Amplifying the Mathews language, the Supreme Court wrote in the Hamdi case,

“‘Procedural due process rules are meant to protect persons not from the deprivation, but from the mistaken or unjustified deprivation of life, liberty, or property.’” Moreover, the Hamdi case emphasized that “‘the right to procedural due process is “absolute” in the sense that it does not depend upon the merits of a claimant’s substantive assertions.’”

Noting the irony in the government’s argument, the Supreme Court wrote in U.S. versus Robel, “[I]t would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of one of those liberties . . . which makes the defense of the Nation worthwhile.”

Even in cases involving an enemy combatant, where the military wanted to shortcut the Constitution, the Supreme Court noted in Hamdi, “that a citizen-detainee seeking to challenge his classification as an enemy combatant must receive notice of the factual basis for his classification, and a fair opportunity to rebut the Government’s factual assertions before a neutral decision maker.”

Making a composite of these opinions we have to ask: If the Supreme Court takes the position that judicial process is required for an incarcerated citizen, wouldn’t it provide these same or greater safeguards when the executive branch of the federal government decides to kill a citizen when that citizen is not an imminent threat?

In spite of the executive branch’s attempt to minimize the role of the federal judiciary in wartime, the Hamdi court rejected the idea that war is an excuse to reduce due process to the equivalent of an administrative hearing. “[T]he position that the courts must forgo any examination of the individual case and focus exclusively on the legality of the broader detention scheme cannot be mandated by any reasonable view of separation of powers, as this approach serves only to condense power into a single branch of government.”

No doubt the military will claim that dropping ordnance from drones is more accurate than bombing from bombers, bombers that the military claimed during World War Two were accurate enough to drop a bomb into a pickle barrel. While it is true that drones are often more accurate than bombers, the drone program has been sold on it ability to minimize “collateral damage,” a euphemism for unintended deaths near the target that would be called manslaughter if a citizen did it.

Unfortunately, drones cannot distinguish an American from an Armenian, and as we’ve just learned, neither can the CIA. Furthermore, we have yet to hear that drones can drop ordnance into a pickle barrel. Indeed, we have no evidence of their accuracy. We do know that only thirty percent of American bombs dropped during 1943 landed within a 1,000 foot radius, a large pickle barrel indeed.

It is time for Americans to demand that the executive branch submit itself to the US Constitution that created it; call for federal courts to take note of the Supreme Court’s warning that the executive branch was attempting to “condense power into a single branch of government;” command congress to remain skeptical about drone results as well as determine if “collateral damage” is making us safer or increasing the number of terrorists; and demand that notice and an opportunity to be heard, fundamental to the Bill of Rights, remain sacrosanct.

James P. Stevenson is the former editor of the Navy Fighter Weapons School’s Topgun Journal and the author of The $5 Billion Misunderstanding and The Pentagon Paradox.

Why the Toleration of Brilliant Eccentricity Should Be a Metric for Military Vitality

It is cliché that the military is a place for unimaginative people who like to follow orders, as well as morally challenged ambitious careerists who view “service” in the military as a ladder to status, fame, and wealth.  And it is indeed true that military institutions have a primitive attraction for these kinds of unsavory personalities.  It is also true that the military attracts larger numbers of well intentioned individuals who are motivated by a sense of patriotism and service but have a predilection toward conformity.  These are popular caricatures, and there is accuracy in them

But there is more.  There is something about the nature of military institutions that attracts a small minority of brilliant eccentrics and individualists who are driven by a desire to do something as opposed to being somebody.  They walk to the beat of their own drummer and there is no exact parallel in the private sector.

Of course, those prone to doctrinaire thinking always make up the majority, and the careerists at the top of the greasy pole of blind ambition view these few eccentrics as crazy lunatics, as royal pains in the ass, and most importantly, as threats who should be purged from the bureaucratic system, lest they poison the impressionable minds of younger officers and enlisted men.  But to my thinking, these eccentrics are the creative jewels in the military’s crown, as well as being a joy to be around, and I think the degree of begrudging tolerance for the small number of eccentric geniuses is a little-examined indicator of the vitality of any military institution.  

With the possible exception of the Marine Corps, that tolerance has been steadily extinguished in US Department of Defense since the end of the Vietnam War.  This is particularly true for the US Air Force, where at least one general recently equated dissent from the AF party line (regarding the controversial AF decision to scrap the highly effective A-10 in favor of the far higher cost, problem-plagued F-35) as “treason.”  

This brings me to the memory of Colonel Everest Riccioni who died in April at the age of 91 and is accurately memorialized by the Project of Government Oversight (attached below).  Riccioni was a brilliant eccentric who believed in and acted on his ideas, often to his own detriment.  It is a testimony to a somewhat healthier time that he was never accused of treason — but he was exiled to Korea (the American equivalent to Siberia during the Vietnam years) for his advocacy of larger numbers of smaller, lower cost, higher performing fighters.   Riccioni was a founding member of the dreaded Fighter Mafia, an informal group of like minded individuals whose membership included Colonel John Boyd, Pierre Sprey, Chuck Meyers, and Tom Christie.* Against  all odds, the Fighter Mafia changed the character of fighter/attack aviation in the Air Force and Navy in the 1970s and postponed for 30 years the aviation death spiral that, in the absence of their kind of “eccentric” countervailing force today, is reasserting itself with a vengeance — at even higher cost to the American taxpayer and by extension the soldiers and marines on the ground doing the heavy lifting.  Yet the example of the Fighter Mafia is still buried up by the defenders of the status quo.

Like his compatriots, Riccioni was a colorful, legendary character: In conversation he often referred to himself in the royal third person — as Riccioni, yet he never pulled rank on those junior to him. I first heard about him indirectly from one of his secretaries during a visit to the Pentagon in 1969 or 1970. Over lunch, she told me she worked for this “spooky” (unnamed) colonel who always carried an arrow, and she did not know why, because he only used it was as pointer in briefings.   Riccioni was in a lifelong battle with one of his dearest friends, John Boyd, over who invented a particular tactical dog fighting idea in the 1950s.  Boyd once called me at 2 AM bragging he was going through is files and  “I got the bastard,” because Boyd found something he had written in 1955 that predated something Riccioni had written by two months. No doubt, given Riccioni’s predilection for writing, Boyd’s gotcha was not the end of the story.  But their “battle” did not prevent Riccioni from writing a beautiful recommendation to help ensure that Boyd, a character of equal eccentricity and brilliance but more prickliness, was promoted to colonel.  Riccioni loved to write … often his controversial technical analyses were embedded in long flowery verbiage that got him into trouble and sometime drove his admirers, like me, nuts.  Boyd loved Riccioni, but he once told me that someone needed to “break Riccioni’s pencil” before Rich committed seppuku with it. 

The Air Force (and the military services in general)  would be a healthier and more vibrant place if it learned how to nurture, tolerate, and take advantage of the real contributions and ideas of its eccentrics — thanks to POGO, the life and legend of one the best is brilliantly memorialized below. 

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* Some writers have mistakenly included my name in the membership of the Fighter Mafia. While all the members are close friends of mine, their work on the lightweight fighter program pre-dated my association with them as a group.

Member of Fighter Mafia Passes

Project on Government Oversight, May 6, 2015

http://www.pogo.org/our-work/straus-military-reform-project/military-people-and-their-ideas/2015/member-of-fighter-mafia-passes.html

 Left to right: Chuck Myers, Pierre Sprey, Chuck Spinney, Everest Riccioni, Tom Christie, and of course, Winslow Wheeler. Photo courtesy of James Stevenson.

Colonel Everest E. “Rich” Riccioni USAF (ret.) passed away on April 15 in Monument, Colorado, at the age of 91. We at the Project On Government Oversight were privileged to have a fighter aviation expert of his stature as advisor, consultant, and contributor to our work. We will miss the brilliance of his insights, his lucid analyses of airpower and its costs, his dedication to improving national defense while reducing its burden on the taxpayer, his unforgettable, larger-than-life personality, and his passionate advocacy of all things Italian.

To say he was a colorful character is a vast understatement: his business card included Raconteur, Bon Vivant, and World’s Third Greatest Fighter Aircraft Designer. Whether lecturing as a charismatic professor of Astronautics at the Air Force Academy or leading radically innovative aeronautical programs in the Pentagon, he always carried an arrow, both as a pointer and as a reminder of the real fundamentals of war. The Academy cadets loved him for it. The Pentagon generals hated the reminder.

Rich had a long and storied career. He joined the U.S. Army Air Force in 1943, eventually flying C-46 transports on dangerous missions over the “Hump” in the India-Burma Theater, then service-testing newly assembled P-38s, P-51s and B-24s. After a brief stint away to get his aeronautics and mathematics degrees, he returned to the Air Force in 1949. He became a test pilot at the Air Force’s legendary Edwards test base and then an instructor at the Experimental Test Pilot School, the beginning of his lifelong love of teaching. All told, Riccioni flew 55 military aircraft of all types, particularly fighters, logging 5,500 hours in the air over the course of his career.

In the wake of Sputnik, the Air Force selected him for advanced graduate work in Astronautics at MIT, then tasked him to develop and teach the Academy’s first high-level Astronautics course. In four years of inspired teaching, Riccioni left behind hundreds of awestruck, devoted students. After several more stints in fighters including F-100s, F-104s, and F-4s, he was transferred in 1969 to Air Force HQ in the Pentagon to work on F-15 R&D.

There Rich quickly became disenchanted with the unnecessary complexity and large size of the F-15, convinced that its high cost would destroy the possibility of acquiring an adequate number of fighters. Despite the Air Force’s enormous pro-F-15 career pressures, he courageously joined forces with two like-minded Pentagon dissidents, Col. John Boyd, the Air Force’s greatest air-to-air tactics innovator, and Pierre Sprey, the OSD “whiz kid” hated throughout the Air Force for his anti-bombing, pro-fighter analyses. They formed a triumvirate that Rich quickly dubbed the Fighter Mafia, dedicated to producing the most unbeatable, smallest, and cheapest air-to-air fighter in the world. At great risk to his career, Riccioni created and funded the initial covert design program that launched the unprecedented F-16 versus F-17 prototype flyoff competition.

It took five more years of incessant bureaucratic guerilla warfare in the corridors of the Pentagon and the Capitol to shape the design and then nail down production funding, but the Fighter Mafia prevailed: the F-16 became the backbone of the USAF fighter force and the F-17 morphed into the F-18 to become the dominant Navy fighter. It was Riccioni’s proudest achievement but it ended his military career: the USAF Vice Chief of Staff banished him from the Pentagon to Korea and thence to a career-end tour as the commander of the Wright Patterson Flight Mechanics Division, a staid bureaucracy he shook to its roots with his crusading advocacy of supersonic cruise for fighters.

Rich retired from his beloved Air Force in 1976 and started a distinguished 15-year civilian career leading path-breaking design and analysis projects, including supercruising fighters, in Northrop’s Advanced Design department. Retiring from Northrop in 1981, he branched out on his own as an aviation consultant.

In the late 1990s, Riccioni and POGO began working together, primarily on cutting back the technically flawed and hugely expensive F-22, a fighter Rich passionately opposed. The plane’s grossly excessive complexity destroyed the supercruise capability that he had been advocating for 20 years; even worse, he saw that the fighter’s unaffordable and burgeoning sticker price—eventually $419 million per fighter—was forcing the Air Force into "unilateral disarmament.” Rich’s vision was soon vindicated: in 2009 Defense Secretary Robert Gates terminated the F-22 at a uselessly small force of 187 aircraft. You can see some of his prophetic work with POGO here:

Will We Ever Fly Before We Buy? F-22 Doesn't Meet Basic Testing Criteria - See more at: http://www.pogo.org/our-work/reports/2001/ns-fa22-20010102.html#sthash.caNK2gRb.dpuf

Will We Ever Fly Before We Buy? F-22 Doesn't Meet Basic Testing Criteria, January 2, 2001

Riccioni Responds to F/A-22 Advocates, March 23, 2005

For other points of view on Riccioni’s fascinating life,see the excerpts from Robert Coram’s meticulously researched and superbly insightful biography of Col. John Boyd (Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed The Art Of War, Robert Coram, 2004) and from Col. Riccioni’s own short autobiographical essay, written in 2014 and printed below:

EVEREST E. RICCIONI, COL., USAF
Brief Summary of My Background and Major Achievements
9-8-14

I volunteered to be an Aviation Cadet in WW-II. On graduation from flight training as a 2nd Lieutenant, I wanted to be a fighter pilot but was assigned to instruct in BT-13s. I left to fly Curtiss 46 transports in Cairo and Karachi, India. In India I did limited service testing of P-51 Mustangs, P-38 Lightings, and B-24 Liberator bombers, assembled for the war in China.

Discharged as a 1st Lieutenant, I attended the University of Minnesota to gain two degrees – a Bachelor of Science degree in Aeronautical Engineering, and a Master of Science degree in Applied Mathematics minoring in Physics and Aeronautical Engineering.

I returned to the Air Force in l949, and was assigned to the Experimental Flight Test Center to perform three roles - one as a flight test engineer; after graduation from the Experimental Flight Test Pilot School I did some flight test programs; and the lastly as an instructor in academics and flight test techniques in the EFTPS. I was promoted to Captain. Qualified to fly 12 aircraft, I was privileged to fly all the fighters, bombers, and transports at Edwards FTC. I managed to get a six week program to Nellis AFB in the Fighter Weapons School. Flight-testing fighters does not transform one into a competent operational fighter pilot, so I transferred to the 36th Day Fighter Wing in Germany, flying F-86Fs and F-l00Cs, the first operational supersonic fighter. While there I was selected for astronaut training in the first class. I declined the privilege… My wife presented me the first of three wonderful children.

Russia launched ''Sputnik" so I was assigned to Massachusetts Institute of Technology for almost four years of advanced studies in Astronautical Engineering. I was promoted to Major and I flew T-33 jet trainers. The following assignment was to the USAF Academy where I was assigned to create and teach ASTR0-551, one of the two most advanced engineering courses at the USAFA. I flew T-33 jets with the AF and F-l00Cs with the Colorado Air National Guard. I was promoted to Lt. Colonel. During the lax summers I created a program for the USAFA pilots to retain their flight currency. I was ordered to Nellis AFB to become current in F-100s.

On separate summers, I was ordered to fly F-104s at Luke AFB, F-105 Thunderjets at McConnell AFB, and F-4C Phantoms at George AFB preparatory to a quick short combat tour n Vietnam. That short program was cancelled. While still teaching at the Academy, I wrote a manuscript defining modem fighter tactics - TIGERS AIRBORNE. It was published by the USAFA, together with the course book for Astro 551. My wife presented me with children four, five, and six.

Next assignment was to the Air War College. While there, I completed a Master of Science degree in International Relations with George Washington University. Then on to a year of flying F-4Ds at Homestead AFB for the Combat Readiness Training Program in preparation for assignment in Vietnam. At Homestead, I was promoted to full Colonel, which promotion kept me from being assigned to the Vietnam war that was winding down.

Next assigned to the F-15 Office in Tactical Fighter Requirements on the Air Staff in the Pentagon in 1969. I achieved little to improve the F-15, however, on seeing the threat to our airpower posed by the expensive F-15 (its cost would shrink Tactical Air Command and never allow the USAF sufficient numbers for future wars), I assigned myself the additional duty of solving the numbers deficit by conceiving a new low­cost fighter. Together with Col. John R. Boyd, a famous Air Force pilot, and Pierre M. Sprey, a "whiz kid" in the Office of the SecDef, we described the need for it and determined its performance, range, speeds, and maneuvering requirements. My desires and efforts would have been fruitless, but for these two geniuses who believed in me and my program and joined me to form a triumvirate still renowned as the Fighter Mafia. Boyd and I briefed the USAF and the aircraft contractors on the concept. The generals wanted only F-15s for the foreseeable future. Amazingly, I was allowed to work on my self-assignment, but the Air Staff generals "knew" they could and would prevent the program from maturing. But the other two Mafia members involved the Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, and the Congress to overrule the recalcitrant generals. The F-16 won the competitive fly-off, and went into production concurrently with the F-15 in 1974. These two geniuses made my dream of increasing (doubling) the size of the USAF fighter fleet a reality. Further, through no effort of the Fighter Mafia, two aircraft contractors convinced the US Navy that a navalized version of the F-17, i.e., the F-18, would be an excellent fighter for the USN. Today the F-15 has essentially disappeared, and the then-prime USN carrier defense fighter, the F-14, is long gone. Advanced versions of the F-16 and the F-18 are still in production after 47 years - a world record. Many of the world's countries bought them, returning much gold to the US. The Fighter Mafia determined the nature of the fighter forces and the air order of battle for the USAF, the USN, and much of the world.

As a "reward" for this achievement, I was banished (punished) by the Air Staff to a year in South Korea, as Director of Operations and Training of the 314th Division at Osan Airbase i n 1973. My formal request to be assigned to Vietnam was turned down, without explanation. Next assignment was a compromise banishment tour to Hawaii as Deputy Commander of the 326th Air Division in Hawaii and as an analyst in PACAF HQ. Despite differing with two major generals, I was finally deemed "rehabilitated" in two years and assigned to command the Flight Mechanics Division at Wright Patterson AFB in 1974.There I managed the research on supersonic cruise fighter design, convened the first nationwide Secret Supersonic-Fighter Design Conference and inspired the second. I retired from the USAF at WPAFB in September of 1976.

Soon I was employed by Northrop Aircraft Division as Staff Assistant to support the Head of Advanced Design. I managed several projects to enhance their current aircraft, e.g., mounting the powerful GAU-13 30 mm anti-tank cannon underneath their smallest fighter. I was allowed to manage the design of several aircraft, among them a high performance supersonic-cruise fighter. I was selected by the B-2 Division to assist in several important projects – one of them quite critical. Two vice presidents ordered me to analyze the future that conventional (non-nuclear) weapons held for the B-2. They were surprised by my answer, but accepted it. I retired from Northrop in 1981.

Tremblay Report: Unlocking the Power of John Boyd's OODA Loop

Introduction to the Tremblay Report

Colonel John Boyd may be the most influential American strategist of the late 20^th Century, yet he remains widely misunderstood.  If you do a word search on the internet for “Colonel John Boyd” or OODA loop, you will get hundreds, if not thousands of hits — most superficial, many misleading, a large number downright incorrect.  This applies as much to enthusiastic self-proclaimed ‘Boydians’ (a cultish term I detest) as well as Boyd’s many critics.  (New readers: see this link for an Introduction to the Strategic Theories of John Boyd)

A large part of this interpretative problem stems from Boyd’s idiosyncratic way of presenting and documenting his ideas.  

Boyd left only a paper trail of complex, ever-evolving briefing slides, almost aphoristic in content.  Interpretation of his work is complicated further by the fact that Boyd was a master of “idea compression.” He obsessed over boiling down his ideas their essence.  Therefore his work is open to competing as well as evolving interpretations.

His “idea compression” can be seen vividly in his elegant technical tour de force on energy maneuverability.  His briefings on the nature of human conflict, assembled under the title, A Discourse on Winning and Losing, while far vaster in scope (covering ideas gleaned from history, evolutionary biology, anthropology, formal logic, mathematics, science, and philosophy), were constructed in the same spirit of idea compression. The building blocks take the form of an accumulating web of carefully worded pithy statements, punctuated occasionally by subtle changes in these statements.  The result is a maddening mix of precision and ambiguity that is open to rich interpretive growth as well as confusion and misinterpretation.  I am convinced, based on my many discussions with him over 23 years, this result was quite deliberate.

Colonel Boyd left no definitive text explaining his work beyond The Discourse.   The word “discourse” in his title was not chosen lightly; and it implies a Socratic dialectic of a spoken discussion and debate — and that is the way he thought.   My own view is that this construction was inspired by a desire to make his work open* to growth in the presence of changing conditions, and therefore timeless in the aphoristic style Sun Tzu, the only military theorist Colonel Boyd never criticized.  He knew producing an open system of thought greatly increased the risk of accidental as well as deliberate misinterpretation, but that was the price to pay for and openness to spirited debate, future intellectual growth, and timelessness.

In this spirit, it is with great pleasure that I am attaching a very thoughtful and clarifying addition to the growing literature describing Boyd’s theories.  This link will take you to a masters thesis written by Major Paul D. Tremblay Jr, (aka P.J. Tremblay)** USMC as part of his study in the Command and Staff College of the U.S. Marine Corps.  In my opinion, Tremblay has produced precisely the kind idea expansion that Colonel Boyd was trying to inspire with his Discourse.  

P.J. Tremblay’s thesis aims to clarify what is perhaps the single most misunderstood aspect of Boyd’s theory of interacting OODA loops: the confusion of absolute speed with relative quickness, particularly as it applies to agility in Orientation and Re-Orientation.  Tremblay’s aim is to improve the Marine Corps training curriculum by clarifying Boyd’s ideas and laying out a way to better incorporate them in progressively more comprehensive ways at each level in the Marine Corps’ educational system, from the lowest to the highest level.  

PJ’s  thesis is a case study in the kind of intellectual development and stimulation that John Boyd was trying to achieve by leaving the Marine Corps Research Center with the complete archive of his briefings and note.  Boyd, an honorary Marine, would say, “Semper Fidelus, PJ.”

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* Understanding the distinction between open and closed systems is central to understanding Boyd’s epistemology.  He discusses this in his paper Destruction and Creation and I relate that paper to his OODA loop in my lecture Evolutionary Epistemology. One can think of the construction of the Discourse as a meta-application of his philosophical viewpoint.

** Caveat emptor: PJ Tremblay is a close friend.  Major Tremblay did not know Colonel Boyd but has been aware of his briefings since he was a 2^nd Lieutenant at the Marine Corps Basic School.  He is the only officer I know who has studied and applied Colonel Boyd’s ideas in a premeditated way in designing and  the leading a combat operation (Operation Eastern Storm in Kajaki Sofla, Helmand Province Afghanistan, 2011 -- Major Tremblay's application of Boyd's ideas can be seen throughout his in end of tour report, but are especially notable in Topic F which contains his description of Eastern Storm)  This multi-pronged reinforced company level attack on the Taliban was a stunning success and based on radio intercepts, it became clear he penetrated his adversary’s OODA loops and collapsed the opposing units into confusion and disorder, exactly like Boyd predicted.  His thesis does not discuss this operation.

Andrew Cockburn's Kill Chain - II (an excerpt)

The following is an excerpt from Andrew Cockburn's new book, Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins Henry Holt, 2015). 

'Drones, Baby, Drones!' The Rise of America's High-Tech Assassins

By Andrew Cockburn,  Alternet, March 30, 2015

[Reposted with permission of the author, originally posted by Alternet]

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/rise-americas-high-tech-assassins#.VRnX0u-Oxco.twitter

The Richard M. Helms Award dinner, held annually at a major Washington hotel, is among the highlights of the intelligence community’s social calendar. Hosted by the CIA Officers Memorial Foundation, the event raises and distributes money to aid families of officers killed in action, whose sacrifice is commemorated in the rows of stars carved into the wall of the foyer at agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The venue for the 2011 event, held on March 30, was the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Pentagon City, and as usual it attracted hundreds of intelligence luminaries, current and former. Joining them were senior executives of various defense corporations—Lockheed, SAIC, Booz Allen, General Atomics, and others—who had generously sponsored tables at the event.

There was much to celebrate. President Barack Obama, who had run a quasi-antiwar liberal campaign for the White House, had embraced the assassination program and had decreed, “the CIA gets what it wants.” Intelligence budgets were maintaining the steep upward curve that had started in 2001, and while all agencies were benefiting,none had done as well as the CIA. At just under $15 billion, the agency’s budget had climbed by 56 percent just since 2004.

Decades earlier, Richard Helms, the CIA director for whom the event was named, would customarily refer to the defense contractors who pressured him to spend his budget on their wares as “those bastards.” Such disdain for commerce in the world of spooks was now long gone, as demonstrated by the corporate sponsorship of the tables jammed into the Grand Ballroom that evening. The executives, many of whom had passed through the revolving door from government service, were there to rub shoulders with old friends and current partners. “It was totally garish,” one attendee told me afterward. “It seemed like every arms manufacturer in the country had taken a table. Everyone was doing business, right and left.”

In the decade since 9/11, the CIA had been regularly blighted by scandal—revelations of torture, renditions, secret “black site” prisons, bogus intelligence justifying the invasion of Iraq, ignored signs of the impending 9/11 attacks—but such unwholesome realities found no echo in this comradely gathering. Even George Tenet, the CIA director who had presided over all of the aforementioned scandals, was greeted with heartfelt affection by erstwhile colleagues as he, along with almost every other living former CIA director, stood to be introduced by Master of Ceremonies John McLaughlin, a former deputy director himself deeply complicit in the Iraq fiasco. Each, with the exception of Stansfield Turner (still bitterly resented for downsizing the agency post-Vietnam), received ringing applause, but none more than the night’s honoree, former CIA director and then-current secretary of defense Robert M. Gates.

Although Gates had left the CIA eighteen years before, he was very much the father figure of the institution and a mentor to the intelligence chieftains, active and retired, who cheered him so fervently that night at the Ritz-Carlton. He had climbed through the ranks of the national security bureaucracy with a ruthless determination all too evident to those around him. Ray McGovern, his supervisor in his first agency post, as an analyst with the intelligence directorate’s soviet foreign policy branch, recalls writing in an efficiency reportthat the young man’s “evident and all-consuming ambition is a disruptive influence in the branch.” There had come a brief check on his rise to power when his involvement in the Iran-Contra imbroglio cratered an initial attempt to win confirmation as CIA director, but success came a few years later, in 1991, despite vehement protests from former colleagues over his persistent willingness to sacrifice analytic objectivity to the political convenience of his masters.

Gates’s successful 1991 confirmation as CIA chief owed much, so colleagues assessed, to diligent work behind the scenes on the part of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s staff director, George Tenet. In 1993, Tenet moved on to be director for intelligence programs on the Clinton White House national security staff, in which capacity he came to know and esteem John Brennan, a midlevel and hitherto undistinguished CIA analyst assigned to brief White House staffers. Tenet liked Brennan so much that when he himself moved to the CIA as deputy director in 1995, he had the briefer appointed station chief in Riyadh, an important position normally reserved for someone with actual operational experience. In this sensitive post Brennan worked tirelessly to avoid irritating his Saudi hosts, showing reluctance, for example, to press them for Osama bin Laden’s biographical details when asked to do so by the bin Laden unit back at headquarters.

Brennan returned to Washington in 1999 under Tenet’s patronage, initially as his chief of staff and then as CIA executive director, and by 2003 he had transitioned to the burgeoning field of intelligence fusion bureaucracy. The notion that the way to avert miscommunication between intelligence bureaucracies was to create yet more layers of bureaucracy was popular in Washington in the aftermath of 9/11. One concrete expression of this trend was the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, known as T-TIC and then renamed the National Counter Terrorism Center a year later. Brennan was the first head of T-TIC, distinguishing himself in catering to the abiding paranoia of the times. On one occasion, notorious within the community, he circulated an urgent report that al-Qaeda was encrypting targeting information for terrorist attacks in the broadcasts of the al-Jazeera TV network, thereby generating an “orange” alert and the cancellation of dozens of international flights. The initiative was greeted with malicious amusement over at the CIA’s own Counterterrorism Center, whose chief at the time, José Rodríguez, later opined that Brennan had been trying to build up his profile with higher authority. “Brennan was a major factor in keeping [the al-Jazeera/al-Qaeda story] alive. We thought it was ridiculous,” he told a reporter. “My own view is he saw this, he took this, as a way to have relevance, to take something to the White House.” Tellingly, an Obama White House spokesman later excused Brennan’s behavior on the grounds that though he had circulated the report, he hadn’t believed it himself.

Exiting government service in 2005, Brennan spent the next three years heading The Analysis Corporation, an obscure but profitable intelligence contractor engaged in preparing terrorist watch lists for the government, work for which he was paid $763,000 in 2008. Among the useful relationships he had cultivated over the years was well-connected Democrat Anthony Lake, a former national security adviser to Bill Clinton, who recommended him to presidential candidate Barack Obama. Meeting for the first time shortly after Obama’s election victory, the pair bonded immediately, with Obama “finishing Brennan’s sentences,” by one account. Among their points of wholehearted agreement was the merit of a surgical approach to terrorist threats, the “need to target the metastasizing disease without destroying the surrounding tissue,” as Brennan put it, for which drones and their Hellfire missiles seemed the ideal tools. Obama was initially balked in his desire to make Brennan CIA director because of the latter’s all-too-close association with the agency’s torture program, so instead the new president made him his assistant for counterterrorism and homeland security, with an office down the hall from the Oval Office. Two years into the administration, everyone in the Ritz-Carlton ballroom knew that the bulky Irishman was the most powerful man in U.S. intelligence as the custodian of the president’s kill list, on which the chief executive and former constitutional law professor insisted on reserving the last word, making his final selections for execution at regularly scheduled Tuesday afternoon meetings. “You know, our president has his brutal side,” a CIA source cognizant of Obama’s involvement observed to me at the time.

Now, along with the other six hundred diners at the Helms dinner, Brennan listened attentively as Gates rose to accept the coveted award for “exemplary service to the nation and the Central Intelligence Agency.” After paying due tribute to previous honorees as well as his pride in being part of the CIA “family,” Gates spoke movingly of a recent and particularly tragic instance of CIA sacrifice, the seven men and women killed by a suicide bomber at an agency base, Forward Operating Base Chapman, in Khost, Afghanistan, in 2009. All present bowed their heads in silent tribute.

Gates then moved on to a more upbeat topic. When first he arrived at the Pentagon in 2007, he said, he had found deep-rooted resistance to “new technology” among “flyboys with silk scarves” still wedded to venerable traditions of fighter-plane combat. But all that, he informed his rapt audience, had changed. Factories were working “day and night, day and night,” to turn out the vital weapons for the fight against terrorism. “So from now on,” he concluded, his voice rising, “the watchword is: drones, baby, drones!”

The applause was long and loud.

Excerpted from Andrew Cockburn's new book, Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins Henry Holt, 2015).  Reprinted here with permission from the author.

Andrew Cockburn's Kill Chain - A Book Review

The attached book review is a slightly revised version of The Folly of Machine Warfare, which I wrote for Counterpunch in its March 27-29 edition.

Chuck Spinney

Book Review

Kill Chain: The Rise of High Tech Assassins

Andrew Cockburn

Henry Holt and Co. (March 10, 2015)

Caveat emptor: the author of this book is a friend of thirty-five years, so I am biased, proudly so in this case.  While I know what Cockburn can do, I must admit I was literally blown away by this book. And I am no stranger to this subject, having worked as an engineer-analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon for 25 years.  

What makes Cockburn’s book so powerful, in my opinion, is not only his sourcing and detail (which are amazing), but the fact that he has written a book that is at once overwhelming in terms of information, yet so well written, it is accessible to the general reader.  It is a page turner.  He dissects the rise of drone warfare and examines its conduct in fascinating detail from the point of view of the targeteers in the CIA and the White House, to the controllers in front of video screens, and to the effects on the victims at the receiving end.  

In so doing, he shows how the ideology of drone warfare is really old wine in a new bottle: it is a natural evolution of three interconnected mindsets: (1) the flawed ideas underpinning the now-discredited theory of strategic bombing in WWII; (2) the search for perfect information embodied in disastrous all-knowing, all-seeing electronic battlefield (starting with McNamara’s electronic line of Vietnam); and (3) the search for surgical precision in both conflict and coercive diplomacy embodied, for example, in the simplistic targeting theories underpinning the drug war and the primitive escalate-the-pressure tactics of precision targeted sanctions.  At the roots of these three ideologies, I would argue, is an unchanging three-part set of propositions woven together in the 1930s by the evangelical instructors in the Army Air Corps Tactical School. They preached the theory of victory thru airpower alone, and they believed that only strategic bombing could justify an independent Air Force on a par with the Army and the Navy, with comparable or even larger budgets.

These future leaders of the AF constructed a seductive tautological argument, based on the fallacious assumptions of having extensive a priori knowledge of the enemy’s inner workings coupled to perfect combat intelligence.  It remains unchanged to this day and goes like this: (1) The enemy is a physical system or network made up of critical linkages and nodes, be they ball bearing works in Schweinfurt, Salafi fanatics in Iraq with access to cell phones and the internet, or Pashtun warlords in the hills of Afghanistan. (2) The enemy system can be reliably analyzed and understood from a distance, making it possible to exactly identify those specific nodes or links that are vital to the functioning of the adversary system, be it an industrial power like Germany, a tribal alliance in Yemen, or the financial links of a terrorist network or foreign oligarchy. (3) That past failures are irrelevant because new technologies will provide the wherewithal to attack and destroy these vital nodes or links with precision strikes and thereby administer a mortal wound to the adversary.  

In short, the conduct of war is an engineering problem: In the current lexicon of the Pentagon and its defense contractors, the enemy is a 'systems of systems' made up of high value targets (HVTs) that can be identified and destroyed without risk from a distance with unmanned systems, and the military-technical revolution makes any past failures irrelevant to current capabilities. The reasoning is identical to that described in the preceding paragraph.  Yet despite stridently confident predictions of decisive precision effects, from the days of the Norden bombsight in B-17s to those of the Hellfire missile fired by drones, this theory has failed over and over to perform as its evangelists predicted and are still predicting. The need to dismiss the history of repeated failures is why the never-ending promise of a military-technical revolution is central to the maintenance of the ideology.

Viewing war as an engineering problem focuses on technology (which benefits contractors) and destructive physical effects, but this ideology ignores and is offset by the fundamental truth of war: Machines don’t fight wars, people do, and they use their minds.  Our technology’s physical effects can be — and often are — offset or mitigated by our opponent’s mental counters or initiatives, reflecting both his adaptability and unpredictability, and his moral strengths, like resolve and the will to resist. Combat history has proven over and over that mental and moral effects can offset physical effects, for example, when the destruction of ball bearing factories did not have its predicted effects in WWII, when bicycles carrying 600 pounds of supplies were used to by pass destroyed bridges on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and when the Serbs used cheap microwave ovens to fool expensive anti-radiation missiles in Kosovo.  And as Cockburn shows, this has proven true again in the ongoing war on terror, and its mirror image, the war on drugs.  

Any one who doubts that this critique applies to drones used in a counter-terror strategy should be asked to explain the collapse in Yemen — a place where drones reached their apotheosis as the centerpiece of American counter-terror strategy. 

Cockburn has provided a highly readable, and logically devastating story, written from a bottom-up empirical perspective.  He explains why our strategy in Yemen was doomed to fail, as indeed it has in recent weeks. His meticulously referenced historical and empirical research makes this book hard to pick apart. No doubt, there are some small errors of fact.  For example, not all the drone/bombers deployed in ill starred Operation Aphrodite (which blew up JFK's elder brother) in 1944 were B-24s as Cockburn incorrectly suggests; the operation also used B-17s.  But I defy anyone to find a single thread or family of threads that can be used to unravel his tapestry. 

An Excellent Summary of the Syrian Civil War

No end in sight for Syria war as conflict enters fifth year

Four years since the start of the conflict, Assad is emboldened as international attention is drawn to the threat of Islamic State

Middle East Eye, Sunday 15 March 2015 11:12 GMT

http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/syria-enters-fifth-year-bloody-civil-conflict-73269927

Syria’s conflict enters its fifth year on Sunday, with no end in sight to the fighting. 

More than 210,000 people have been killed and half of the country’s population displaced, prompting rights groups to accuse the international community of “failing Syria”.

The country now lies carved up by government forces, militant groups - including Islamic State - Kurdish fighters and the so-called moderate opposition. 

Diplomacy remains stalled, with two rounds of peace talks achieving no progress and even a proposal for a local ceasefire in Aleppo fizzling out.

The conflict began as an anti-government uprising, with small-scale protests, inspired by similar revolts in Egypt and Tunisia, taking place in Damascus in February.  

But things quickly spiralled when the government arrested and tortured a group of teenagers in the southern city of Deraa. In response, hundreds took to the streets in Damascus and Aleppo on 15 March. Several days later, on 18 March another protest broke out after Friday prayers in Deraa. Government forces once fired on the demonstrators, killing several people. The violence only prompted thousands to turn out the following day to attend the funerals of those killed. The government once again fired on the marchers, killing between one to six people according to activists. The government then released the teenagers on 21 March, but the deaths and the fierce crackdown prompted a militarisation of the uprising and its descent into today’s brutal multi-front conflict.

The consequences have been devastating.

The UN refugee agency UNHCR says Syria is now “the biggest humanitarian emergency of our era”.

Around four million people have fled abroad, with more than a million taking refuge in neighbouring Lebanon.

Inside Syria, more than seven million people have been displaced, and the UN says around 60 percent of the population now lives in poverty.

The country’s infrastructure has been decimated, its currency is in freefall and economists say the economy has been set back some 30 years.

Assad government emboldened

Rights groups have documented horrific violations, with the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reporting this week that 13,000 people had been tortured to death in government detention since the uprising began.

Tens of thousands more remain in government jails and detention facilities, with many effectively disappearing after their arrest.

Despite international outrage at the death toll, and allegations that his government used chemical weapons against its own people in August 2013, President Bashar al-Assad has clung to power.

His forces have consolidated their grip on the capital Damascus and are moving to encircle rebels in the second city of Aleppo to the north.

The assaults have been aided by the government’s increasing reliance on crude explosives-packed barrel bombs, which Assad denies using despite extensive documentation.

His government is newly emboldened by both its military successes and an apparent shift in international rhetoric.

Calls for his resignation have been notably more muted as international attention shifts to the threat posed by the Islamic State group.

Diplomats describe a new willingness to countenance a role for Assad in Syria’s future, and even the rhetoric from key Assad opponent Washington has shifted.

On Friday, CIA director John Brennan said Washington was concerned that the “collapse” of Syria’s government could open the way for a IS takeover.

US Secretary of State John Kerry has also stressed that Washington’s top priority is defeating IS. 

Little prospect for peace

Last year, the United States assembled a coalition of nations to fight the group in Syria and Iraq, where IS rule a swathe of territory they have deemed an Islamic “caliphate”.

Air strikes, particularly in concert with the efforts of Kurdish fighters on the ground in Syria, have rolled back some IS gains, but the group continues to wield significant power.

It has grabbed international headlines with gruesome propaganda videos depicting the killings of journalists, aid workers and other civilians.

It has also attracted thousands of foreign fighters, many from the West, prompting concern about the prospect of attacks by returning militants.

Despite the international attention, there is little prospect of a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

Two rounds of UN-sponsored talks in Switzerland failed to achieve progress, and Staffan de Mistura, the third UN envoy to tackle the conflict, has gained little traction with his proposal for a localised ceasefire in Aleppo.

Russia, a key Assad ally, is floating its own dialogue process, and will host talks in Moscow in April, but it remains unclear if the internationally recognised opposition will attend.

On Thursday, a group of 21 rights groups denounced the international community for failing to implement UN resolutions and end the conflict.

“This is a betrayal of our ideals,” said Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council group.

How Tough is the Peshmerga?

The Peshmerga, manned by Sunni Kurds, is generally considered to be the West’s toughest and most reliable bulwark against Isis in Iraq.  But for reasons explained by Patrick Cockburn below, that belief may reflect more of a hope than a strategic reality.

War with Isis: The Kurdish Tiger's roar is worse than its bite - the Peshmerga have come to rely on US air strikes

World View: With militant fighters at the gate, the former boom town of Irbil is full of refugees and abandoned buildings

BY PATRICK COCKBURN, Independent, 8 March 2015

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/war-with-isis-the-kurdish-tigers-roar-is-worse-than-its-bite--the-peshmerga-have-come-to-rely-on-us-air-strikes-10093497.html

[Reposted with permission of the author]

“They are like the Mongols,” says Najmaldin Karim, speaking of the forces of Islamic State (Isis) battering at the defences of the oil province of Kirkuk, of which he is governor. They have not broken through and he is confident they will not do so, but the threat they pose and the fear they cause is the dominant feature of life even in those parts of northern Iraq they did not conquer last year.

In terms of the terror that Isis inspires through the savagery of its actions, it does indeed have much in common with the Mongolian horsemen who destroyed Baghdad and slaughtered its inhabitants in 1258. Isis similarly cultivates an atmosphere of fear among its enemies, so that the Iraqi army disintegrated when Isis forces stormed Mosul last June and much the same thing happened when they attacked the supposedly more resolute Iraqi Peshmerga in Sinjar and Nineveh Plain a few months later.

The swift victories of Isis at that time gave the impression of a demonic and unstoppable force. In the eyes of Isis leaders, military successes far beyond what they had expected simply affirmed that they were carrying out God’s work and had divine support. Less attention was given to the weaknesses of the states and armies which Isis had so easily defeated. But it is on their ability to learn from past failings that the outcome of the war now being fought in Iraq and Syria will be determined.

Criticism of Isis’s opponents and their dismal performance on the battlefield has mainly focussed on the Baghdad government. There is no doubt that its corruption and sectarianism played into the hands of Isis. Less attention is given as to why the military forces of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), supposedly far tougher and better commanded, fled from the Isis attack in August even faster than the Iraqi army in June. Yazidi villagers from Sinjar and Christians from the Nineveh Plain complain bitterly that they were abandoned by Peshmerga units whom only hours earlier had sworn to defend them to the last drop of their blood. It was one of the most shameful defeats in history.

The KRG has always got a better press than the Baghdad government, particularly since its oil boom got under way in the past five or six years. It presented itself as “the other Iraq”, which functioned properly, and Kurdish leaders invariably disparaged the central government in Baghdad as crooked and dysfunctional. They pointed to new five-star hotels, shopping malls, roads, bridges and apartment buildings sprouting on every street in Irbil, the Kurdish capital. There was a boom town atmosphere, and there were very few places on earth of which this could be said in the wake of the financial crash of 2008. Delegations of foreign businessmen, many of whom could not have found Iraqi Kurdistan on the map a couple of years earlier, poured into Irbil. Local managers complained that they could not find rooms for them despite all the new hotels. It seemed to go to the heads of Kurdish leaders who spoke of KRG becoming like an oil state in the Gulf, a landlocked version of Dubai.

Visiting KRG a couple of years ago, I felt that it was alarmingly similar in mood to Ireland pre-2008 at the height of the Celtic Tiger boom. The Kurds and the Irish are both small nations who feel they have been hard done-by throughout their history. Now they had thrown off foreign oppression and were getting rich like their neighbours. In Irbil as in Dublin it was a feeling conducive to delusion and a belief that “the Kurdish tiger” would bound forward for ever.

What those plane-loads of over-optimistic foreign government ministers and businessmen never understood was how fragile all this was. There was more in common between the ways in which the KRG and the rest of Iraq were ruled than they imagined. The Kurds depended on their 17 per cent share of Iraq’s oil revenues to pay the one in three of the labour force that worked for the government. Corruption was rife. A friend told me that he lived in part of Irbil surrounded by director generals working for the government: “I have a higher salary than any of them, but they have houses three times bigger than mine.” One Kurdish woman told me: “I call it ‘Corruptistan’.” For all the new five-star hotels, it was difficult to find a good school or hospital.

KRG was always flattered by any comparison with Baghdad. “Ease of doing business in Irbil compared to Baghdad is very good,” a businessman told me in early 2013. “Compared to the rest of the world it is rubbish.”

What really made Iraqi Kurdistan different from the rest of Iraq was that security was good, and it felt safe. Kurds and foreigners alike never seemed to look at a map and notice that they lived an hour’s drive from some of the most violent places on the planet. Mosul is only 50 miles from Irbil and has never been other than an extraordinarily dangerous city since 2003.

The belief that Iraqi Kurdistan is the safe part of Iraq was punctured when Isis captured Mosul last June. Even then, the Kurdish leadership deluded itself that what had happened was a Sunni-Shia battle in which they could stay on the sidelines and even benefit by opportunistically taking over Arab-Kurdish disputed areas. In August, they discovered they had made a calamitous error when Isis launched an ambitious offensive that came close to capturing Irbil. The United States and Iran rushed to help, while the KRG’s new ally, Turkey, found itself unable to.

Irbil today looks like Pompeii or Herculaneum in which a sudden disaster – in the Kurds’ case military rather than volcanic – has frozen all activity. The city is full of half-completed hotels, shopping malls and apartment buildings. Some of these are crammed full of refugees living in huts provided by the UN High Commission for Refugees. These are the people who are paying the price for the Kurdish leadership’s delusions of grandeur and security. Overall, there are 1.2 million extra internally displaced people and Kurdish refugees from Syria in KRG since last June. Kurdish leaders claim credit for giving them refuge, but many of those who have lost their homes blame those same leaders for underestimating the Isis threat when it was containable.

The Peshmerga have made successful counter-attacks, taking back much of Sinjar, but Mosul and its surroundings remain firmly under Isis rule and, so long as this continues, the KRG will remain fundamentally insecure. Crucial to the Peshmerga advances have been US air strikes, and it is noticeable in visits to the frontline how dependent the Peshmerga is on US air power.

This staves off the prospect of total defeat, but the future of the Iraqi Kurds still looks grim even if it is not as bad as it looked last August when many in Irbil started to flee the city just as they had done in 1991 during Saddam Hussein’s counter-offensive. Whatever happens, as in Ireland after 2008, the days of the “Kurdish tiger” are truly over.