Stories from the staff of — and contributors to — the award-winning Pacific Standard.
May 24, 20123 min read
Genetically Modified Goats Take on Child Killers
by Rachel Swaby
Researchers at the University of California at Davis are teaming up with a herd of goats to attack the world’s second leading cause of childhood death.
The target: diarrhea.
The weapon: goat’s milk.
The dozen-plus Davis goats have been altered with a single human gene that gives their milk extraordinary bacterial fighting abilities. Since the early 1990s, UC Davis animal scientist James Murray has been pushing mice, cows and goats to do a better job of producing the protein lysozyme. His early work focused on how the protein could make processing milk into products like cheese and yogurt easier.
But lysozyme has some powerful antimicrobial properties as well. Murray knew this going in — it was discovered almost a century ago by Alexander Fleming, the man who brought the world penicillin. Shortly after Murray began his experiments, he decided the project should shift focus. “We were always interested in both, but it was clear the bigger issue was helping kids,” says Murray (referring to young humans, not goats).
Lysozyme’s high concentration in breast milk is one of the reasons that nursing babies have fewer tummy troubles than those on formula. But after kids stop breast feeding, lysozyme is not as abundant in their diets. That’s a particular problem in areas where the drinking water is often full of diarrhea-causing bacteria. While lysozyme is present in goat and cow’s milk, it’s at levels too low to make a difference. Goat’s milk, for instance, contains only 0.06 percent of what’s offered by human milk.
So Murray took the human genes responsible for lysozyme production and inserted them into goat’s DNA. The result is goat’s milk with levels of the of the protein at 67 percent of what is present in human milk.
A study Murray and his team published in 2008 in the Journal of Nutrition found that feeding pigs the lysozyme-enhanced milk did their stomachs good. Compared to a control group, the genetically enhanced stuff significantly cut coliform bacteria in the pigs’ small intestines. And a more recent study observed that the milk both tamped down inflammation in the gut while also beefing up the cells that serve as the intestine’s first line of defenses against bacteria.
Murray isn’t the only one trying to use genetically modified goats to save lives. Researchers at Texas A&M University are working to produce goats milk that contains a malaria vaccine.
Sounds promising, right? As it turns out, the biggest hurdles that these projects face are not scientific, they’re regulatory.
In 2009 Murray formed a partnership with some Brazilian researchers to produce a herd of his transgenic goats in their country. The research was more likely to get funded since childhood diarrhea is a more pressing problem in Brazil, and funding for genetic modifications always is difficult because the research makes the public squeamish, says Murray. Still, he and his partners expected to start human trials within two years. But three years later, the semen meant to jump-start the South American herd hasn’t left U.S. soil.
“We have approval to have animals there,” says Murray, “but we have not been given permission for the semen to be shipped.” The Brazilian government requires a certain kind of semen center certification that is not standard practice for the USDA. The discord in regulations has made building a new herd difficult. Attempts at transgenic goats via cloning haven’t gotten off the ground either.
Regulators in the U.S. are similarly moving slowly to open their gates. Genetically engineered salmon have waited more than a decade to get FDA approval for them to be introduced in the wild. Despite public hearings and an advisory committee’s attention, no decision has been made.
Later this year Murray will test the milk in monkeys. The results could mean a lot for his goats — and for sick children around the world.
Next Story — The Intersection of Policy and Practice in the Office
Currently Reading - The Intersection of Policy and Practice in the Office
Stories from the staff of — and contributors to — the award-winning Pacific Standard.
19 hrs ago6 min read
The Intersection of Policy and Practice in the Office
It’s up to all of us to close the gap between workplace code and culture.
By Tami M. Forman
(Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
A lot of space, time, and energy has been devoted to policies — both public and corporate — around women in the workplace. That makes sense given how much both public and company policy can either support or undermine the advancement of women and the health of families.
But I don’t think nearly enough attention gets paid to practice — that is, our collective and individual support for the policies that already exist to support workplace flexibility. We all know of companies that have great policies to support working families — generous leave, flextime options, part-time schedules — but nevertheless employ parents who leave in droves because the policies are never actually implemented, or because the people who do take advantage of them get sidelined. It’s easy to be cynical when this happens and conclude that the company never intended the policy to be used. That the executives are just looking to get credit for the policy without having to suffer any negative consequences, the thinking goes.
But let us for a moment assume that the company and its executives aren’t being cynical by enacting policies they don’t really support.
If we were to investigate all the moments when policy and practice get misaligned, I think the first place to look is executive disconnect and even hubris. Too many people in the C-Suite believe that if they say something is important then the rank-and-file will automatically understand that it’s important. Too often they fail to connect the policy to corporate goals in a way that makes it clear that the practice is important to success. Generally speaking, companies adopt family friendly policies to attract and retain the most talented employees. That won’t happen if the company gets a reputation for not allowing those same employees to use family friendly benefits. Even the public relations benefits of a good policy will be undermined if employees to take to sites like Glassdoor to complain. When executives fail to connect these dots, is it any wonder that line managers fall back onto the practices that are more comfortable and familiar?
Policies that encourage flexibility — especially when they don’t seem to support managers in achieving results — can feel very threatening.
In fact, many companies have policies that create unintended disincentives to the practices around flexibility. For example, too many companies still calculate head-count by literally counting the number of heads that are on the books with benefits. If a company offers benefits to part-time workers (a great family friendly practice!) then departments can end up feeling short-staffed if those part-time workers count as full-timers from a budgeting perspective. If the department head has discretion they will deny requests for part-time schedules — a practice they probably already resisted. Executives need to be proactive in supporting managers through training, development, and aligning resources and outcomes. When they fail at any of these, the family friendly policies are often the first things to fly out the window.
Also, when policies are not “fair” to everyone they will be much less widely implemented. When flexible schedules are only available to parents, for example, it can create an “us” and “them” mentality that has a host of downstream implications for camaraderie and manager support. This can leave parents wary of accessing the policies for fear of resentment and even retribution. Those fears are not unfounded — research shows that people who ask for flexibility, even when the company explicitly offers it, are rated as lower performers than those who don’t. Work/life conflict doesn’t only happen to parents and everyone deserves to be able to access the flexibility they need to live a rich life. When companies extend these policies to everyone they reduce the stigma attached and derive more benefits in the form of attracting and retaining a more diverse workforce.
Of course, executives don’t always know if policies are being implemented and, if they aren’t, why. This data doesn’t show up in generic surveys about how workers feel about the corporate culture. If companies want to really understand if the policies are working as intended, they need to delve a bit deeper. Questions about culture and work/life fit should also be a standard question during exit interviews. The best employees will vote with their feet by heading to another company that they perceive as being a better work environment. It’s also crucially important to delve into why employees, particularly female employees, opt-out of the workforce. There are plenty of women (and, increasingly, a few men) who want to take some time away from their career to spend more time with their family. But there are any number of them who could have been retained if the company had a clear track record of supporting (not just offering) flexible work arrangements.
What’s more, executives are only part of a company — and only part of the problem. The rest of us are the other.
Ultimately, the policies of a given company are supported or undermined by the line managers. This effect works in both directions — the manager who rolls his eyes and sighs heavily any time someone on his team asks for a work-from-home day and the manager who looks the other way when someone works from home even when the official policies forbid it.
And why wouldn’t managers be supportive of these policies? There are a lot of reasons, but most boil down to two simple emotions: fear and prejudice. Managers at almost any company are under a lot of pressure to generate results. Policies that encourage flexibility — especially when they don’t seem to support managers in achieving results — can feel very threatening. Also, many managers, both men and women, got to their position without the benefit of family friendly policies. They may resent new employees who come in and look to benefit from them. They may also feel bias toward workers who take advantage of these policies and see them as less committed to their job.
The focus on policies that support women and families in the workplace needs to continue — there are still far too many companies that are stuck in the past when it comes to helping their employees achieve both professional and personal fulfillment. But when we ignore how these policies are put into practice and fail to see all the ways that policies can be undermined by the very people they are meant to support, we miss a big opportunity to move our society in a more positive direction.
Stories from the staff of — and contributors to — the award-winning Pacific Standard.
21 hrs ago17 min read
How Missteps by the White House and Congress Left Iraq Vulnerable to the Islamic State
An investigation finds that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton initially pressed to keep civilian programs and listening posts in Iraq after the U.S. troop pullout in 2011, but then her Department of State scrapped or slashed them at the behest of the White House and Congress.
By Jeff Gerth & Joby Warrick
Hillary Clinton and Prime Minister of Iraq Nouri al-Maliki talk to reporters after a meeting at the Department of State on October 19, 2009. (Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
A week before the last United States soldiers left his country in December 2011, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki traveled to Washington to meet the team that would help shape Iraq’s future once the troops and tanks were gone.
Over dinner at the Blair House, guest quarters for elite White House visitors since the 1940s, the dour Iraqi sipped tea while Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke of how her department’s civilian experts could help Iraqis avoid a return to terrorism and sectarian bloodshed.
Iraq would see a “robust civilian presence,” Clinton told reporters afterward, summing up the Obama administration’s pledges to Maliki. “We are working to achieve that,” she said.
Less than three years later, the relatively calm Iraq that Maliki had led in 2011 was gone. The country’s government was in crisis, its U.S.-trained army humiliated, and a third of its territory overrun by fighters from the Islamic State. Meanwhile, Department of State programs aimed at helping Iraqis prevent such an outcome had been slashed or curtailed, and some had never materialized at all.
Clinton’s political foes would later seek to blame her, together with President Barack Obama, for the Islamic State’s stunning takeover of western Iraq, saying the Department of State failed to preserve fragile security gains achieved at great cost by U.S. troops. In a speech last Monday on how he would deal with terrorist threats, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said, “The rise of ISIS is the direct result of policy decisions made by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton.”
But an intensive review of the record during Clinton’s tenure presents a broader picture of missteps and miscalculations by multiple actors — including her Department of State as well as the Maliki government, the White House, and Congress — that left Iraqi security forces weakened and vulnerable to the Islamic State’s 2014 surge.
Documents and interviews point to ambitious plans by Department of State officials to take control of dozens of military-run programs in Iraq, from training assistance for Iraqi police to new intelligence-collection outposts in Mosul and other key Iraqi cities. But the Department of State scrapped or truncated many of the plans, sometimes at the behest of a skeptical Congress and other times on orders from the White House, which balked at the high costs and potential risks of U.S. civilians being killed or kidnapped. Still other efforts were thwarted by a Maliki government that viewed many of the programs as an unwelcome intrusion in Iraqi affairs.
Senior Department of State leaders were at fault as well, according to documents and interviews with officials who helped manage Iraqi aid programs after the withdrawal. By early 2012, pressed by the White House to reduce the U.S. civilian footprint in Iraq, the department had begun implementing sweeping, across-the-board cuts that extended to security and counterterrorism initiatives once considered crucial for Iraq’s stability after the withdrawal of U.S. troops, a joint investigation by ProPublica and the Washington Post found.
Clinton, a member of the administration’s national security team at the time, argued at first in favor of many programs that the Department of State eventually cut, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with internal White House deliberations. For the Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. policy misadventures in Iraq, from the initial invasion and occupation to the disasters after the U.S. troop withdrawal, have persistently undermined Clinton’s efforts to tout her extensive record in foreign policy. Candidate Clinton has frequently pushed for more assertive engagement with Iraq’s military and tribal alliances to help repel the Islamic State, essentially arguing for an expansion of programs that were curtailed on her watch after the U.S. troop withdrawal in 2011.
A Department of State team that administered the cuts under White House direction eventually ended up with a $1.6 billion surplus — money initially appropriated for Iraq that was freed for use in other conflict zones, including Libya, officials and documents say.
The downscaling was done over the objections of U.S. military leaders on the ground, who said the slashing of key assistance programs — in a few cases, by more than 90 percent — left the U.S. government increasingly in the dark about developments outside the Iraqi capital. Some former officers who managed Iraqi aid programs say the cuts were a factor in the slow deterioration of Iraq’s security forces in the months before the Islamic State’s 2014 assault.
“Our job was to prevent this from happening,” said retired Rear Admiral Edward Winters, a former Navy SEAL and deputy director of the Office of Security Cooperation in Iraq, a Pentagon organization overseen by the Department of State that managed the bilateral security relationship.
“We felt the capability to do that was being taken away.”
A Strategic Vacuum
Current and former Obama administration officials, including some who sparred with the Department of State over Iraq policy, defend Clinton as one of the most vocal advocates for a muscular U.S. presence in Iraq after the withdrawal deadline. Clinton argued publicly and privately for keeping a contingent of U.S. troops in Iraq after December 31, 2011, and when that effort failed, she lobbied the White House and Congress for money to fund civilian-run security programs in Iraq, her former aides said. In written memos and in meetings as part of the president’s national security team, she questioned Maliki’s ability to keep the country united and warned that instability could lead to a resurgence of al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI, the terrorist group that later re-named itself the Islamic State, the officials said.
“She was seized with this,” recalled Deputy Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, who was national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden and then deputy national security adviser to Obama during key discussions about Iraq policy. “She recognized that AQI was down but not out, and pressed the Iraqis, and us, to keep taking the fight to them.”
But, in scaling back civilian assistance to Iraq, Clinton’s aides cut aggressively and sometimes unwisely, internal auditors later concluded. The reductions met cost-cutting goals but did not “fully consider U.S. foreign policy priorities in Iraq,” an internal review by the Department of State’s inspector general said. Some of the cuts were not fully implemented until after Clinton’s departure in early 2013, though the plans were largely in place, former aides said. The report is silent on Clinton’s role in the reductions, or views about them.
“There was a period of time after the transition from the military-led mission to a civilian-led mission when strategic decisions were not made, with one official calling the period ‘a strategic vacuum,’“ the inspector general’s office said in its 2013 report, citing interviews with department officials in Washington and Iraq. It said the cuts were driven by “Congressional and White House concerns that the Department quickly reduce costs and security vulnerabilities and address [the Iraqi government’s] desire for a more normalized U.S. diplomatic presence.”
Among the casualties was a U.S. Army-run Iraqi tribal reconciliation program with a record of successfully resolving disputes between Iraq’s querulous Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish factions. Animosity between Sunni tribes and Maliki’s Shiite-led government would become a key factor in the Islamic State’s takeover of Iraq’s Sunni heartland in 2014.
Asked to account for such cuts, a Department of State spokesman said in an email that diplomats lacked “the personnel or financial resources” to continue many of the programs begun by the Pentagon during an era when tens of thousands of U.S. troops were serving in Iraq. In any event, the result was “lost trust with the Sunni community” and the abandoning of an important window into what was really happening inside Iraq, said retired Army Colonel Rick Welch, who oversaw the program before the military withdrawal.
“No one from the State Department ever contacted me,” Welch said in an interview. Eventually the Baghdad-based reconciliation effort was scaled back “to a trickle,” he said, “and then nothing else happened.”
It Was the President’s Directive
In the first weeks of his presidency, Obama flew to Camp Lejeune, the sprawling Marine base in North Carolina, to repeat a promise made throughout his election campaign: a pledge to wind down America’s wars in the Middle East. He told the troops that “the war in Iraq will end” through a responsible drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq by December 31, 2011, the deadline set three years earlier by the George W. Bush administration.
In reality, few within Obama’s own administration expected that the entire U.S. contingent would exit Iraq by that date, current and former aides say. In interviews, Department of State and Pentagon officials said they were convinced that Iraq would ultimately negotiate an agreement to leave a modest contingent of U.S. soldiers — perhaps 10,000 or so — in the country to ensure stability and serve as a bulwark against a resurgence of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
President Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki leave a joint press conference in the Rose Garden at the White House in 2009. (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)
The presence of even a small American force would have provided a substantial benefit for U.S. diplomats in Iraq after 2011, assuring that the Pentagon would continue to take the lead in U.S.-Iraqi military liaison programs while also helping with mundane but necessary functions such as security, medical care, food service, and transportation on the ground and in the air.
But with a deadline looming and no firm decision from the White House, the Department of State began to develop plans for hiring thousands of contractors to perform the same services at higher costs. The uncertainty lingered until October 2011, when the talks collapsed just 10 weeks before the deadline for pulling all U.S. forces out of the country.
Throughout this period, Clinton continued to campaign for what several aides called a “robust” mission for American diplomats in Iraq, preferably backed by a significant U.S. troop garrison. Her advocacy was recalled by numerous military and intelligence officials who participated in classified discussions on Iraq. It was also expressed publicly in news conferences and congressional testimony at the time.
“She was very focused on how to apply the full weight of the U.S. government to locking down that residual troop presence,” said Jake Sullivan, the Department of State’s director of policy and planning who later became the top foreign policy adviser to the Clinton campaign. As prospects for U.S. troop garrisons began to dim, Clinton “insisted on a robust contingency planning process, to leave nothing to chance on how we protected our civilian presence and how we made sure that we were supporting the outlying posts beyond Baghdad,” Sullivan said.
Department of State officials initially planned for taking control of more than a third of the 1,300 programs and missions run by the Pentagon in Iraq. That alone, as Clinton herself would acknowledge, constituted the “largest transition from military to civilian leadership since the Marshall Plan,” the extensive U.S. aid effort after World War II.
Contingency plans created in 2010 envisioned taking over key security missions, such as the tribal reconciliation program. Another initiative called for building new diplomatic and intelligence outposts around the country to give the U.S. a presence in cities that once hosted American military bases. These facilities, called “Enduring Presence Posts,” or EPPs, were initially planned for five Iraqi locales: Irbil, Diyala province, Kirkuk, Basra, and Mosul.
Department of State officials urged Congress to approve funding for the EPPs, saying the listening posts would help “mitigate ethno-sectarian conflict” while allowing the security officials to better “forecast, prevent or contain instability outside of Baghdad.”
“Spotting emerging problems early is going to be critical,” Clinton’s aides wrote in a 2010 staff report to lawmakers. The report raised concerns about the department’s ability to carry out some of its new mandates without U.S. military support, but it urged congressional appropriators to put up the necessary financial backing.
In Washington, both the White House and Congress viewed the plans with deepening skepticism. At a March 2011 Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, Senator Lindsey O. Graham (R-South Carolina) appeared to scoff at the idea of a civilian force of diplomats and contractors “trying to do business in Iraq all over the place with no troops.
“That is basically a private army replacing the American military,” Graham said to Clinton. “So I’d like us to think long and hard as a nation — does that make sense?”
The cost of building, equipping, and securing diplomatic enclaves in Iraqi cities such as Mosul — a hotbed of Sunni terrorism in 2011 — struck senior Obama aides in the meetings as exorbitantly expensive and impractical, even more so because of Maliki’s growing antipathy toward U.S. interference in Iraq’s domestic affairs, according to current and former aides who participated in the private discussions.
The loss of a U.S. troop presence meant the closing of all U.S. military installations, including dozens of Provincial Reconstruction Teams, the smaller regional units from which U.S. military and civilian workers administered aid to local towns and tribes. Unable to rely on Iraqi help, Department of State officials would have to hire an army of contractors to replicate the functions and services previously provided by the Pentagon. For U.S. diplomats, a routine journey along the 40-mile highway from Baghdad to Baqubah would now be a complicated and dangerous affair in which assassination or kidnapping would be a constant threat.
The decision to scale back plans for the post-2011 civilian mission was made by Biden and a faction of White House officials that included staff members of Obama’s National Security Council, who were given primary responsibility for managing relations with Iraq, according to accounts from current and former U.S. officials who participated. A team led by Department of State Deputy Secretary Thomas R. Nides was put in charge of reviewing and implementing the reductions, with support from Department of State officials in Washington and Baghdad. Clinton, having lost the argument for a larger force, was briefed about the developments but left it to her subordinates to decide how the cuts would be implemented, several former and current administration officials said.
Biden’s office declined to comment on the reductions, though former aides said the cuts reflected the prevailing view at the White House and on Capitol Hill: that a large civilian force in Iraq would not be sustainable once U.S. troops were gone.
“The president made the decisions on the military drawdown, and it was the president’s directive that we were all executing,” Nides said. “On the civilian side, the White House’s big worry was the security of our people. Once the decision was made that we weren’t going to have the authority to keep our military there — and even before it was made — we knew we not only couldn’t afford to keep growing, but we had to reduce. At one point, we had the biggest civilian footprint in the world.”
Administration officials insisted that a smaller, civilian-led force could continue to provide critical support for Iraq’s transition, but the cuts were demoralizing to Department of State and Pentagon officials who saw prized aid programs shrink or disappear. Department of State officials tried to persuade other agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, to split the costs of operating posts in Mosul and other provincial cities, but that idea withered as well.
“The robust presence we envisioned did not survive,” recalled a former Department of State official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private White House deliberations about Iraqi policy. “Things kept getting whittled down. We’d come back from each meeting with bad news about the latest thing to get scrapped.”
A Slow-Motion Nightmare
Meanwhile, other programs intended to help Iraqis battle terrorism were facing a quiet death.
On January 1, 2012, the first day after the U.S. troop era officially ended, 157 American military service personnel remained in Iraq as part of the Department of State-run Office of Security Cooperation in Iraq. Pentagon and Department of State officials sought and won authorization to expand the number by nearly twofold, from 157 to about 300, to be backed by a supporting cast of thousands of contract workers, according to documents and former officials.
Pentagon budget documents in early 2012 called the unit vital to counterterrorism efforts, facilitating the sharing of intelligence between military and civilian agencies in both the U.S. and Iraq. Among other missions, it provided support for Iraq’s elite terrorism-fighting unit, known as the Counter Terrorism Service.
But the program began shrinking almost immediately after the troop withdrawal, former Pentagon officials remembered.
“It started going away,” remembered Winters, the former deputy director.
A section of the last American military convoy to depart Iraq from the 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division arrives in Kuwait in 2011. (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
A 2013 report by the Pentagon’s inspector general said the cuts amounted to unilaterally slashing such programs to meet budget goals. The department implemented a “primarily top-down directed initiative in which cuts were made based on percentages and targets across assigned agencies without sufficient consideration of their differing missions and resources requirements,” the report said.
An early casualty was direct U.S. support for Iraq’s Counter Terrorism Service. The number of embedded U.S. advisers to the elite terrorist-fighting unit dropped from more than 100 before the military withdrawal to just two, according to Winters and other former Pentagon officials who served in Iraq.
Another key Pentagon program that helped the U.S. government collect and analyze intelligence about terrorist activities was scrapped. Charles Bova, who ran the program, said the scuttling of the project resulted in the loss of an important window into Iraq that could have provided Americans and Iraqis with “a better awareness of what al-Qaeda in Iraq was up to.”
A training facility in Kirkuk was shuttered, not only because of budget cuts but also because of resistance from Maliki’s Shiite-led government, which had begun to push back against U.S. assistance programs in predominantly Sunni and Kurdish provinces. Immediately after the U.S. troop departure, Maliki began ordering the arrests of rival Sunni politicians while replacing U.S.-trained Iraqi generals with Shiite allies personally loyal to the prime minister. Some of the same Maliki appointees would later abandon their divisions as the Islamic State began its assault on Mosul.
Sunni protests against Maliki erupted in 2012 and, almost in tandem, the number of suicide bombings in Iraq started to rise. The terrorist predecessors of the Islamic State began gaining strength across Iraq, aided by the worsening sectarian tensions as well as the fighting next door in Syria, where the civil war gave jihadist leaders a cause and a safe haven in which to re-build.
“None of us thought the problem was gone — we thought we were leaving a void there,” Winters said. “We all expected that [al-Qaeda in Iraq] would come back and get worse. But we didn’t think it would happen that fast.”
Worried that Iraqi security was unraveling, Clinton and other senior Obama advisers quietly lobbied Iraqi leaders to accept new forms of assistance unfettered by Department of State legal and budgetary constraints. Beginning in late 2011, Clinton joined then-CIA Director David H. Petraeus and other White House officials in seeking to persuade Maliki to host a joint U.S.-Iraqi “fusion cell,” consisting of intelligence experts and Special Operations forces from both countries, according to officials who participated in the talks. The White House also offered Maliki non-lethal surveillance drones to help track the movement of suspected terrorists, the officials said.
The Iraqis appeared open to both ideas but made no move to implement them. The possibility of U.S.-supplied drones in Iraq was nixed by Maliki after news of the offer leaked to the media. Both programs were eventually implemented, but only after waves of Islamic State suicide bombings began to threaten security in Baghdad.
“It was like one of those slow-motion nightmares,” said Blinken, the Department of State official. “We were moving our own system, trying to move Congress, trying to move the Iraqis. We saw this thing coming, we were acting on it, but the problem outran the solution we were putting into place.”
The budget cuts did achieve one positive, and perhaps unexpected, result: a budget surplus. By May 2012, the Department of State was sitting on $1.6 billion in funds that Congress had appropriated for Iraq, but which the department no longer intended to use there. Department officials had the option of re-directing those funds, and did so, shifting some of the money to other conflict zones, including Libya, according to public documents and former officials.
A large chunk of leftover cash was initially earmarked for the construction of a new diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, the restive Libyan city which Clinton had planned to visit in late 2012. That idea abruptly ended after the deadly September 11, 2012, assaults on the Benghazi compounds that left four Americans dead.
Prized Targets
On June 4, 2014, the Islamic State, in a quick strike, captured Mosul. The black-flagged terrorists blew past Iraqi army defenders, aided in many cases by Sunni tribesmen who saw the jihadists as preferable to Maliki’s Shiite-led government.
Whether the additional security assistance could have helped prevent the collapse of Iraq’s security services is impossible to say with certainty. Many current and former administration officials, including some who strongly favored a residual U.S. troop presence, argue that Maliki’s inept management of the military and repression of the country’s Sunni minority inalterably weakened the country and made it vulnerable to collapse. If a few hundred Americans had been stationed in Mosul in 2014, these officials say, they might have become prized targets for the terrorist army that overran the city that summer.
“People have an illusion here,” said Nides, the former Department of State deputy secretary. “From a practical perspective, what you actually get is 20 people with a big security footprint. Are they going to be getting in their cars and driving around talking to tribal leaders? I don’t think so.”
In any case, the Islamic State’s takeover prompted a rush by the Obama administration to restore military-led security assistance programs that had been quietly curtailed after the military drawdown. Within weeks, 475 U.S. troops were sent to advise Iraqi security forces. Today, the level is more than 10 times that. The concern over tight budgets has faded as well: Congress has appropriated billions of dollars to deal with the jihadist threat.
Clinton, the presidential candidate, responded to the crisis as well, putting forward a detailed plan for defeating the Islamic State. She has primarily blamed Maliki, the former Iraqi leader and her former partner during the transition, for the resurgence of the Sunni terrorists. Some of her proposed solutions have called for improving tribal liaisons and intelligence collection programs that were cut or abandoned three years earlier.
“We’ve got to do a better job of getting back the Sunnis on the ground,” she told ABC News in an interview in 2015.
Clinton has stressed her experience and track record in the national security arena as a key selling point on the campaign trail, echoing themes from her memoir, Hard Choices, which chronicled her experiences as secretary of state. The book came out a few weeks after Mosul fell to the Islamic State.
The book made news upon publication because of Clinton’s admission that it was a “mistake” to have voted in 2002 to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq the following year.
On the rest of what happened in Iraq during her tenure as America’s top diplomat, the 635-page book is silent.
This story originally appeared on ProPublica as “As ISIS Brewed in Iraq, Clinton’s State Department Cut Eyes and Ears on the Ground” and is re-published here under a Creative Commons license.
Next Story — My Brother Was Killed by al-Shabaab
Currently Reading - My Brother Was Killed by al-Shabaab
Stories from the staff of — and contributors to — the award-winning Pacific Standard.
2 days ago5 min read
My Brother Was Killed by al-Shabaab
Searching for reflection after a personal tragedy brought about by terrorism.
By Brynne Morris
A Somali soldier stands guard next to the site where al-Shabaab militants carried out a suicide attack against a military intelligence base in Mogadishu on June 21, 2015. (Photo: Mohamed Abdiwahab/AFP/Getty Images)
A seed of hate, once planted, takes very little nurturing to grow strong and powerful.
I first thought this while scrolling through vitriol on Twitter after five police officers were shot and killed in Dallas. But the same principle brought about Paris. And Brussels. And Baghdad. And Istanbul. And Nice. And I do not know how to keep the seed from blossoming. But I do know that the only way to pull it out by the roots is to understand why it was planted in the first place.
I was born and raised Baptist. I have a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern politics and a minor in Islamic studies. I can roughly speak Arabic. And I know first hand the impact and hate caused by a terror attack.
In July of 2010, my brother Nate went to Uganda with the non-profit organization for which we both worked. We had spent the last few years there, trying to raise awareness of one of the longest running wars in East Africa and to help rehabilitate and educate child soldiers. After spending years working in the states on this issue, he finally decided to visit his Ugandan friends and see the schools that he had helped build.
I lived in Uganda in 2009 while working for a missions organization and teaching at a local orphanage. I was so excited for my brother to see the country I grew to love, and for him to have a chance to catch up with our Ugandan friends, Tony and Innocent, who had also worked with us. I told him that the one thing he had to do there was watch a soccer match with Ugandans. He listened to my advice and went with Tony and Innocent to the Kyadondo Rugby club to watch the final match of the 2010 World Cup with hundreds of other Ugandans.
In the middle of the game, three bombs exploded. Two at the rugby club, and one at a nearby bar. An act of terrorism by al-Shabaab, a group that at the time claimed allegiance with al-Qaeda, claimed the lives of 73 Ugandans and one American. My brother.
When I received the news of my brother’s murder, I thought that I was equipped to understand that this was a singular act, not representative of an entire people group or religion.
I heard the news in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I was spending the day with my boyfriend. We had met in Arabic class. I had just finished my freshman year of college and had spent the year learning the ins and outs of Arabic and Islam. I had read the Qu’ran, participated in Ramadan, been to the local mosque, and devoured the writings of Khalil Gibran, Rumi, and Hafiz. The world of Islam was new to me — again, I was born and raised and consider myself Christian — but I quickly grew to appreciate it and see the faith that my Arabic teacher had was not too different than mine.
And so when I received the news of my brother’s murder, I thought that I was well equipped to understand that this was a singular act, not representative of an entire people group or religion. But then, in a brief break from navigating the ins and out of press inquiries, Federal Bureau of Investigation investigations, and funeral arrangements, I found myself at the local mall confronted with my own prejudices and hate.
In the food court, I saw a woman wearing a hijab ordering a drink at McDonald’s. I didn’t know her, I had no reason to dislike her, but in that one glance, I hated her. I have never felt more anger or scorn directed at one human being in my life. In that instant, I felt she had killed my brother and that I was entirely justified in my mistrust and distaste for her. But after that brief moment, I was terrified not of her, but of myself. And of the seed of hate that I felt planted inside of me.
I did not want it to grow. And so instead of giving into the rhetoric that everyone tried to say to make me feel better — “This is what Islam is.” “They hate us because we’re free.” — I chose to turn back to people I knew who could tell me honestly why the people who killed my brother were nothing like the teachers I had grown to love over the last year.
I sent emails to professors who quickly called and met with me, even during summer break. I had tea with them in their homes while their two year olds played in the background. I was scared they would be offended but I had to ask them questions like, “How can those who killed my brother claim the same religion I’ve grown to love and appreciate?” “How are these people different than you?” “Show me why this is not Islam.” They did not react in anger. Instead, they responded with love and grace. In these meetings I learned — and re-learned — the truth that this type of violence is not condoned in the Qu’ran; that my teachers were tired of how often they had to answer these questions; and that attacks like the one that killed my brother made them just as angry and hurt as it made me. That I hadn’t been taught a false narrative of Islam, but rather the members of al-Shabaab were living, and dying, for one.
It’s been six years since my brother was murdered. In that time, I’ve seen more terrorist attacks committed by al-Shabaab, ISIS, and others than I care to remember. I’ve seen families torn apart and communities broken, devastated by the actions caused by a hate grown strong. I’ve also seen nations become polarized, acting as if fear and hate will protect them from pain. And there are policies and actions that can be taken to stop these acts from occurring. That is the job of politicians and officials and authorities. But it is my job — and your job, and our job — to try to understand. To nurture understanding. To dig out, no matter how hard it is or how long it takes, the seed of hate.
Stories from the staff of — and contributors to — the award-winning Pacific Standard.
2 days ago9 min read
The IRS Tax Loophole That Rewards Excessive Water Use in the West
Experts fear tax deductions for water use as a “depleted asset” could actually worsen the crisis as rivers and reservoirs dry up.
By Abrahm Lustgarten
A section of Lake Oroville is seen nearly dry on August 19, 2014, in Oroville, California. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
ProPublica’s reporting on the water crisis in the American West has highlighted any number of confounding contradictions worsening the problem: Farmers are encouraged to waste water so as to protect their legal rights to its dwindling supply in the years ahead; Las Vegas sought to impose restrictions on water use while placing no checks on its explosive population growth; the federal government has encouraged farmers to improve efficiency in watering crops, but continues to subsidize the growing of thirsty crops such as cotton in desert states like Arizona.
Today, we offer another installment in the contradictions amid a crisis.
In parts of the western United States, wracked by historic drought, you can get a tax break for using an abundance of water.
That’s a Typo, Right? A Joke?
Ah, no. But we understand your bafflement. The Colorado River has been trickling, its largest reservoirs less than half full. As recently as 2014 parts of Texas literally almost dried up. The National Academy of Sciences predicts the Southwest may be on the cusp of its worst dry spell in 1,000 years. Scientists are warning that the back-up plan — groundwater aquifers from California to Nebraska — are all being sucked dry.
But, yes, the tax break exists — in parts of eight High Plains states.
Here’s how it works: Farmers — or anyone who uses water in a business — can ask the Internal Revenue Service for a tax write-off for what’s called a “depleted asset.” In certain places, water counts as an asset, just like oil, or minerals like copper. The more water gets used, the more cash credit farmers can claim against their income tax. And that’s just what almost 3,000 Texas landowners in just one water district appear to have done last year — a year in which nearly half of Texas was in a state of “severe” or “extreme” drought.”
Yikes. How Much Can They Write Off?
A bunch it seems, especially if you’re a big farm and own a lot of land. We talked to an accountant in Levelland, Texas. He had a client who wrote off $10,000. “Whenever you buy land, you’re getting the dirt … and of course you are getting the water,” said Sham Myatt, the accountant. And the idea is that that water is part of what you paid for in the land deal. If the aquifer was 50 feet deep at the time of the land sale, and it drops 10 feet in a dry year, then the farmer can deduct one-fifth of the value, and so on, until all the water is gone.
That’s Not Going to Do Much to Conserve Water, Is It?
No. It’s not. In fact it’s an incentive to do the exact opposite. A farmer who tries to use less water because of the drought, say, by switching to really efficient irrigation techniques, could actually make less money. His water might last longer, but producing his crop would get a lot more expensive.
We called Nicholas Brozovic, an associate professor of agricultural economics and director of policy at the University of Nebraska’s Robert B. Daugherty Water for Food Institute. He’d actually never heard of the water deduction; it’s that obscure. But he laid out some textbook economics: If you’re overusing your water, then you are depreciating it, he said. And if the government pays for that, they are subsidizing that depreciation. “The more you deplete your groundwater, the higher your tax exemption and that must create an incentive not to conserve,” he said.
Hasn’t the Federal Government Spent Billions Subsidizing Conservation and the Protection of the West’s Groundwater, in Part by Building Dams and Encouraging People to Use the Water in Rivers Instead? Why Would They Forfeit Federal Tax Dollars to Do the Opposite?
We called the IRS, and they initially shared our doubts. Not because they cared much about groundwater (it’s a tax agency!) but because they said they were pretty sure no such deduction was legal. They pointed us to section 613 of the tax code, and it couldn’t be more explicit: For the purposes of deducting the depreciating value of minerals, the definition “does not include soil, sod, dirt, turf, water, or mosses.” Ok, who would ever have thought of deducting mosses or sod? But anyway. That left us really confused.
Right, There Were, After All, Those Farmers in Texas Who Seemed to Have Benefited From What the IRS Said Was Not Possible.
We encouraged the IRS to check again. They did. And then they found the provision they thought didn’t exist — right there in the text for Revenue Rule 65–296. An IRS spokesperson laid out for us the specifics: “Taxpayers are entitled to a cost depletion deduction for the exhaustion of their capital investment in the ground water extracted and disposed of by them in their business of irrigation farming specifically from the Ogallala Formation.”
Seems Like Some Follow-Up Questions Were in Order.
For sure. We asked for clarification. The IRS said it would try to explain. Most importantly, they wanted to say it wasn’t quite as crazy as it sounded. The deduction is only available for one small part of the country — an area that includes parts of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Colorado. And it should only apply if people are using water from a source that is running dry anyway.
But Wait, What? You Get a Break When You Use Resources That Are Already in Danger of Vanishing?
Yes, that’s why it is what’s called a depleted asset. It’s of less and less value with every day. Your car is worth less the moment you drive it off the lot. Or, more similarly, oil companies track the falling value of their reserves the more they pump out from underground. In fact, energy companies have been taking oil depletion breaks for decades. Texas landowners would say their property is getting less valuable the less water there is to use on it.
OK, OK, but Water Isn’t Oil. It’s Not a Commodity. Access to It Is a Basic Right. Yes? Please Say That’s Right.
Wrong. Ouch. I know, it hurts. But ProPublica last year wrote about all the ways water is coveted and controlled — and then often wasted — by just a few powerful groups. In most of the West, only some people and businesses have rights to it, depending on who showed up to claim it first. One big trend is that water is increasingly being bought and sold — including by hedge funds and big Wall Street investors, and the less water there is, the more the price is going up.
That’s a Little Scary. Let’s Get Back to Depleted Assets. So When Did This Tax Break Start?
About 50 years ago. A farmer in the Texas panhandle — along with his local water district — successfully sued the IRS, arguing that the roughly 200 million gallons he drew from his groundwater each year was no different than the depletion of the state’s other great natural resource, oil. He won, and the IRS was obliged to create rule 65–296 — the special allowance for tax credits that the IRS almost forgot about.
Again, it was supposed to be limited — just to a slice of Texas and eastern New Mexico. The court even went so far as to warn that the case shouldn’t become a precedent for groundwater tax claims elsewhere, saying the conditions in that area of the country were unique. But it didn’t take long for the rule to be expanded, albeit just a little bit. By the mid 1980s any landowner overlying the sprawling Ogallala aquifer — a giant underground vault of precious but dwindling water — was eligible to file for the deductions, not just in North Texas and New Mexico.
That Still Doesn’t Sound Like Much of a Big Deal … Why Does It Matter?
Well, the Ogallala, which spans from central Texas north to Nebraska and South Dakota is the nation’s largest groundwater reserve and is one of the most important, and (famously) threatened water supplies in the country. Its heavy overuse and plummeting water levels rang alarms among policymakers more than half a century ago. So this is no insignificant place to be even indirectly encouraging overuse. Texas’ High Plains are one of the most intensely irrigated and productive farming regions in the country. Hundreds of thousands of acres of cotton and corn, among other staple commodities, are grown there using this Ogallala water.
So, Do We Know What’s Happening to the Ogallala Where All This Farming Is Taking Place?
We looked at recent water level changes in just one district — the one with thousands of tax credit claims — and found a disturbing trend. Underground water levels in the 16 counties of the High Plains Underground Water Conservation District have dropped nearly 10 feet over the last 10 years. Some parts of Castro County saw water levels drop more than five feet over the course of 2015 alone. The federal government estimates nearly 100 cubic miles of water have been withdrawn from the Ogallala in that part of Texas. That doesn’t automatically mean the tax credits are responsible — water levels are dropping in most places thanks to overuse and it would take a lot more research to link up the cause and effect. But it certainly isn’t a portrait of sustainability.
Aquifers Are at Risk Across Arizona, California, and Other States as Well, Right? At Least People Can’t Claim Tax Breaks There?
Not yet. But that could change, as water supplies worsen and word of the tax break circulates more widely. Almost no one we spoke with had heard of it — not water lawyers in Arizona or groundwater conservation scientists in California. Armed with the knowledge, there’s a pretty good chance farmers and businesses across the West could seek tax relief.
Because There Is Precedent?
Exactly.
What Does the IRS Say to That?
They say it’s very unlikely, mostly because they think the conditions in the Ogallala are rare, and that the agency’s policy is to reject water allowance claims anywhere outside of the places covered in the original lawsuit. But if more landowners, in more places, were to file suits challenging the IRS to allow them to deduct for their water, or if they were to petition the IRS directly, the agency says it would undertake a review to consider it on a case-by-case basis. Landowners would have to present extensive scientific evidence that showed their situation was more or less the same as in North Texas.
Is the IRS Equipped to Make Such Judgments?
Fair question. John Leshy, professor emeritus at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, and a former solicitor for the Department of Interior, isn’t persuaded. “The IRS has really created a can of worms for itself,” he said. “It doesn’t have any hydrological expertise.”
Hmmm. Not Ideal. But What’s the Bottom Line? Are These Tax Breaks Going to Make Any Real Difference in How Quickly We Use Up the water Supply?
It’s hard to tell, partly because no one appears to have examined that question. We asked the IRS for data on the number of claims and it hasn’t responded. Folks in Texas dismiss the suggestion that the tax benefits are incentivizing water use as ludicrous. Myatt, the accountant, points out that only about one-third of the deducted value translates to cash in hand, and says for many smaller farmers that amounts to just a few hundred dollars. Jason Coleman, manager of the High Plains Underground Water Conservation District, says his members are as concerned about conserving their water for the future as anyone. “Its already a declining resource,” he said. “I just can’t imagine someone saying I’m going to depreciate our resource any more because of a tax claim.”
But the academic consensus is that incentives encourage use, even overuse. And if the effect of depletion allowances on oil production are any guide — Leshy says they have spurred overproduction and led to artificially cheap, subsidized fuel prices — any significant expansion of the groundwater tax credit to other states could have lasting impacts on the way groundwater is used across the country.
So Is Anyone Trying to Do Anything About This?
Not really, which is why people like Brent Blackwelder, president emeritus of the environmental group Friends of the Earth, which has long been involved in rooting out tax policy disincentives to conservation, are fuming. “It’s a pretty major outrage that we would so stupidly reward the over extraction and non-sustainable use of groundwater,” he told me. Blackwelder helped push to purge the tax code of perverse anti-conservation incentives like this one way back in the Reagan administration, with the 1986 Tax Reform Act. They were largely successful, weeding out several other odd loopholes. But the groundwater depletion allowance persisted. And since then, apparently, it’s been forgotten about by all but the farmers who rely on it.
This story originally appeared on ProPublica as “Gimme a Break! IRS Tax Loophole Can Reward Excessive Water Use in Drought-Stricken West” and is re-published here under a Creative Commons license.
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