Oh, And By The Way....

"The selected supplier(s) will send a trainer to Erbil to deliver training on the use and maintenance of the equipment, and will also deliver a train-the-trainer component. This will ensure the proper usage and care of the equipment, as well as optimal use and sustainability."
"[Caveat:] The trainer will only travel if the security situation permits."
Adam Hodge, spokesman, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird"According to the protocol, phase one will include a variety of military equipment for Peshmerga, the most important being the demining robots that can be used for finding and defusing mines and bombs."

Peshmerga Ministry

Sounds extremely useful, a very good strategy, for Canada to supply the Kurdish military with new state-of-the-art bomb-hunting robots. That's a humanitarian gesture and a military assist in one generous gesture. And Kurdish officers with the Peshmerga are grateful, and anxious to receive these new assists in their push-back conflict against Islamic State militias. They most certainly need all the help they can get, those courageous Kurds who are single-mindedly holding back the ISIS/ISIL lethal advance.

And then there's the spoiler: Lt.-Gen. Jabbar Yawar Manda, secretary-general of the Kurdistan Regional Government's Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs has delicately pointed out the infelicitous reality that while the Peshmerga is anxiously awaiting the arrival of the Canadian bomb-hunting robots, once the robots find and unearth the bombs, they're not capable of actually disarming them. And someone will have to. The trouble is that no one among the Kurdish troops is skilled in disarming explosives.

And nor has anyone thought to offer that required training, it would appear at first blush. The robots will be mute on the issue. They will perform what they're programmed to do, and that programming doesn't include decommissioning the explosives. The homemade bombs that the robots will isolate represent the most dangerous threats confronting the Kurdish forces, having accounted for 60 percent of those Kurdish Peshmerga killed in this gruesome confrontation with a merciless enemy.

So, the manufacturer of the robots is tasked to train in the proper usage and care of the equipment, in other words train the Peshmerga how to program the robot. But no mention of disabling the explosives once detected? Moreover even the training of Peshmerga in the proper use of the robots is contingent on the security situation. And the security situation is well enough known to be EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.

So, although the offer is extremely generous and highly useful and much desired and anticipated the element of knowledge and experience and best practices and safety appears to be missing. What kind of crazy situation does that describe? It will, under these circumstances, not be useful to the Peshmerga to receive the robots if they don't know how to make use of them, let alone the disarming techniques required to dispose of the explosives.

So while it's one thing to state that "Canada will not stand idly by while ISIL continues to murder innocent civilians, including members of ethnic and religious minorities" as Foreign Minister John Baird stated when he visited the area in September pledging Canada's aid against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, it seems someone didn't think through these critical issues. Without a doubt the Peshmerga is grateful for the bullet-proof vests and helmets; their method of use is uncontroversial and straightforward.

Canadians can feel proud that the Canadian military has already been busy transporting ammunition, weapons and other equipment to aid the Kurdish forces. Canada's CF-18 fighter jets and other aircraft are set to join the coalition busy bombing ISIL. And the world is waiting with bated breath to finally see Middle East nations putting their boots on the ground of Iraq and Syria to divest ISIL/ISIS/Islamic State of their gains.

Heaven knows the Iraqi central government in Baghdad is playing a lightweight role, other than to defend Baghdad itself, and not doing too credible a job of even that. It's interesting that Kurdish commanders complain the central government's tight control over the country's air space has limited incoming flights carrying weapons and other equipment. The Baghdad central command is clearly compromised by a lack of intelligence.

The question here is what is Canada's excuse for lacking the required focus on the urgent requirement to train Peshmerga forces in explosives defusing, even while Canada is not standing idly by, allowing Islamic State to commit their psychotic madness in a blighted landscape of sectarian dysfunctional insanity?