Posted on 10/17/2017 5:22:00 AM PDT by huldah1776
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton spoke to Breitbart News Daily Sirius XM host Alex Marlow Monday, coming out strongly in support of Iraqi Kurdistan in its bid for independence and criticizing American ties to the Iraqi national government, which he described as “dominated by Iran.” “I support independence for the Kurds in Iraq. It’s no surprise the State Department opposes that. I think the State Department and the Pentagon are still operating under the assumption you can put Iraq back together again, and you can’t,” Bolton told Marlow.
Bolton condemned America’s putative ally in Baghdad as a sectarian force under the spell of Iran. “The Baghdad government is Shia-dominated and dominated, worse than that, by the mullahs in Tehran,” he said.
The autonomous regional government of Iraqi Kurdistan, in a controversial move, held an independence referendum last month that passed by overwhelming margins among the region’s ethnic Kurdish majority. The sizable Arab and Turkmen minorities largely opposed the move and the government of Iraq and the other regional powers of Iran and Turkey immediately threatened intervention if Iraqi Kurdistan declared independence. The American State Department also condemned the vote with spokeswoman Heather Nauert saying, “We have been very clear from the beginning that we oppose that referendum because we thought it would be destabilizing.”
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Iranian terrorists. Anyone know if the Kurds have a military leader?
related: Breitbart News
Report: Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commander Soleimani Aiding Iraqi Invasion Against Kurds
by John Hayward 10/26/2017 excerpt
Major General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the notorious Quds Force division of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has reportedly been seen in Iraq advising Shiite militias in their attack on the Kurdish Peshmerga, a major U.S. battlefield ally against the Islamic State.
Soleimani was involved in talks between Iran-backed “Popular Mobilization Forces” (PMF) militia units and Iraqi Kurds on Sunday, not long before the first reports of armed clashes between the PMF and Peshmerga.
Soleimani’s Quds Force, which Iran employs to destabilize adversary governments across the Middle East, was instrumental in training and arming the Shiite-dominated militia groups against the Islamic State (ISIS), which is organized around a version of Sunni Islam.
Soleimani reportedly “arrived in the Iraqi Kurdish region on Saturday and visited the tomb of former Iraqi president and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan party leader Jalal Talabani, who died on October 3 after years of poor health,” according to a report at the National.
oh, also from Breitbart...
come to think of it, is Kelly keeping this news from Trump?
excerpt 10/16/207 Frances Martel:
Trump MIA as U.S. Coalition Brands Iran-Backed Militia Assault on Kurds ‘Misunderstanding’
President Donald Trump has yet to personally weigh in—either through official White House outlets or on Twitter—on the burgeoning civil war in Kirkuk, Iraq, following the invasion of the Kurdish-held province by Iraqi soldiers and Iran-backed Shiite militias.
The U.S.-led Global Coalition has called the attack on the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) military, the Peshmerga, a “misunderstanding,” while the U.S. embassy in Baghdad expressed “concern” regarding the invasion in a statement Monday.
President Trump repeatedly asserted support for the Kurdish people, whose Peshmerga and Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG/YPJ) have played an outsized role in defeating the Islamic State (ISIS), as a candidate for president in 2016. Following the KRG holding a referendum on seceding from Iraq, however, the U.S. State Department has backed the Iraqi government against Kurdish independence aspirations, and Trump himself has remained silent.
Looks like the Kurds have been sold out again. They need a big power friend and they never seem to come up a winner.
Maybe you should have thought about this when you were spending most of your adult life pushing for the U.S. to invade Iraq and topple its Sunni-dominated Ba'athist government, @SSHOLE.
It's astonishing that so many Freepers were actually pushing for Trump to nominate this useless pr!ck as Secretary of State.
The degree to which we are being jerked around by the Iranians is far greater than most realize.
I know there is a debate over whether or not the Iraqi government has simply become a proxy government for Iran. But Iran has penetrated the Iraqi political and military sufficiently enough to easily make Iranian operations look Iraqi.
It is a complicated, complex problem with many variables. Turkey will not allow an independent Kurdistan. Nor will Iran and Russia. Under the current Iraqi Constitution, the Kurds have a certain degree of autonomy, but there are limits. The distribution of the oil revenue is a sticking point. A signicant portion of Iraq’s oil facilities are located in what would be Kurdistan. Without this oil revenue, Iraq will be hurt economically.
We don’t need to get involved in a civil war.
You're probably right in ways you don't even realize. As we sit here in 2017 and look back over the last 15 years, it's hard to argue with the outlandish suggestion that the entire George W. Bush administration was run by Iranians with American-sounding aliases like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.
The decision whether to allow the Kurds to draw new borders and become a nation is not military, but political
It was a combined pol-mil decision to use Kurds as the backbone of an anti-ISIS army without a follow on plan for their victory
Now it’s Trump’s tar baby and he’s surrounded by the screw ups who created it
I have a Hell of a lot more respect for Bolton than I do for you.
Bolton is a neocon. His interventionist tendencies are dangerous and misguided.
How about this is such a mess that the best we can hope for is to defeat ISIS, leave a semblance of stability and walk out of a problem that we cannot solve - which is why you have to despise Bush, Cheney and the neo-cons for ever getting us in the mess in the first place.
I'm really starting to think this country has been run by retarded baboons for the last 25 years.
Isolationist fools and dim-witted appeasers have been proven wrong over and over but they never learn.
Kurds, say hello to the Hmong and the Montagnards......l
“Iran-Dominated Baghdad Invasion of Kurdish Iraq”
If it is that convoluted, maybe it isn’t open enough to “condemn”, and thus open up all types of headaches, when the proper response is to to fight it “under the table”?
Uh ... whut?
Yeah. Let’s send more troops! I’m sure this time our interference in the ME will bear fruit!
A few screamed “Morons” when Daddy Bush got us in there. The USSR had collapsed and a new neverending world conflict was necessary. We still dance to the tune of the World Bank and the Military_Industrial Complex. Getting involved in the ME is a guaranteed loser and will involve us forever in the unending tribal shifting hatreds.
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