Of course, that's not likely to happen. After all, when everybody is used to getting jobs handed to them if they vote for the government, how will they ever vote for a party that promises to stop the practice?
And so it looks like this type of thing is likely to continue in Iraq for a while. After all, in 2015 the government ordered 15 internet shut downs , many of them for political reasons or to prevent the communication of different factions of ISIS.
Could they be more nuanced about it? Certainly.
"They've taken this very blunt approach, which is to ban or block all internet traffic, and that's certainly not how most censorship works," Oliver Farnan, who works at the University of Oxford's Internet Institute, told WIRED.
"Most censorship is targeted by IP addresses or DNS, or it could be targeted by keywords on websites, but with this they have literally just blocked everything."
But apparently they don't feel like it.
And as we know, the Iraqi government has been a star in making the right decisions about how to run the government, including when they put an army of in Mosul in 2014 that fled at the first sign of trouble when ISIS showed up, even though they outnumbered the attackers almost 40 to one . There were 30,000 soldiers and there were only 800 attackers.
And that, as we all know, is how the self-proclaimed caliphate got access to both the weapons and the hundreds of millions of dollars that they have used to run their campaign of terror and kill tens of thousands of civilians.
This isn't the same thingWill their decision to cut the internet to make certain their students don't cheat amount to the same thing? Of course not. This isn't on the same scale. What it does point out, however, is that they're still not learning from their mistakes -- in this case quite literally, with students resorting to across the board cheating, with their parents help, to get ahead.
That means there is now a culture of corruption, cheating and cutting corners. And once you've got that, it doesn't go away overnight. It takes sustained, long-term effort by people that are willing. And right now it doesn't seem like anybody is willing in Iraq. The problem is always that a mistake weighs far heavier than the right thing and one mistake can outweigh a thousand right decisions.
And it is because of that that we're now in a situation where the government needs to cut internet across the board just to prevent students from being able to cheat. That points to a systemic problem. One that points to a country that is on the verge of becoming a failed state.
That sounds too strong? Well, here's a last little tidbit for you to consider: Two years after running away, the Iraqi army is once again back at Mosul, trying to take it back from ISIS. And you know what's happening? They're running again .
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