Posted on 08/22/2014 2:46:49 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Two weeks ago, President Obama announced air strikes in northern Iraq against ISIS. The mission, as Obama explained it at the time, was designed to pursue two very limited objectives: “targeted airstrikes to protect our American personnel and a humanitarian effort to help save thousands of Iraqi civilians who are trapped on a mountain without food and water and facing almost certain death.”
Two days ago, when Obama spoke in the aftermath of the brutal beheading of the photojournalist James Foley, his verbal tone was visibly angrier. American officials started speaking of their mission in very different terms.
John Kerry wrote that ISIS “must be destroyed/will be crushed.” Then, yesterday, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel called ISIS an “imminent threat to every interest we have,” while Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey conceded that attacks on ISIS could not be limited to Iraq but would also spread into Syria, parts of which ISIS controls, and which has become a border in name only.
A mission to save a few thousand people and prevent ISIS from overrunning northern Iraq seems to have metastasized into something more like a war. What is going on here? What changed?
One possible explanation is that the visceral horror of ISIS’s brutality seized Obama’s attention in a new way. ISIS represents depravity on a scale that defies description — it crucifies people, enslaves women, and wallows in brutality. On a human level, it is difficult to contemplate ISIS in a specific way without confronting the urge to destroy it.
A second explanation, which is not mutually exclusive to the first, is that the new Iraqi government has flipped Obama’s calculus. Remember, Obama pulled American forces from Iraq because he was exasperated with Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, a Shiite who made no pretense of representing the interests of Sunnis and other minorities. Maliki’s misrule helped drive Sunnis into the arms of ISIS. Obama was plain about his refusal to let the United States become Maliki's air force.
But now Iraq has a new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi. Abadi may or may not fundamentally change course in a way that could reestablish the government’s legitimacy. As the New York Times reports, “Interviews with Iraqi political leaders and foreign diplomats paint a more nuanced portrait, with some holding out hope that he could break the mold of Iraq’s recent leaders.”
The new regime may well disappoint in the same way the previous one did. In the meantime, the calculus seems to have changed quickly. The conditions that drove Obama to withdraw American support for the Iraqi government no longer apply.
He was for the first Gulf War before he was against it, too. Then they found a Republican to blame.
Oh.
They must be Democrats.
2011
President Barack Obama on Friday announced that virtually all U.S. troops will come home from Iraq by the end of the year — at which point he can declare an end to America’s long and costly war in that Middle Eastern nation.
“After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over,” Obama said. “The coming months will be a season of homecomings. Our troops in Iraq will definitely be home for the holidays.”
Of the 39,000 troops in Iraq, about 150, a negligible force, will remain to assist in arms sales, a U.S. official told CNN. The rest will be out of Iraq by December 31.
The president said he was making good on his 2008 campaign pledge to end a war that has divided the nation since it began in 2003 and claimed more than 4,400 American lives.The announcement also came after talks that might have allowed a continued major military presence broke down amid disputes about whether U.S. troops would be immune to prosecution by Iraqi authorities.
Obama spoke with Iraqi President Nuri al-Maliki in a video conference Friday, after which he said both nations were comfortable with the decision on how to move forward.
Cohen: We’ve given Iraqis an opportunity White House: Iraqi troops are ready When U.S. troops leave Iraq Iraq war ends, WMDs never found
The new partnership with Iraq will be “strong and enduring,” Obama said.
“The last American soldier will cross the border out of Iraq with their head held high, proud of their success and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops,” Obama said.
“A mission to save a few thousand people and prevent ISIS from overrunning northern Iraq seems to have metastasized into something more like a war. What is going on here? What changed?”
Obama spent 2 days off his vacation and returned to Washington DC. I’m sure interesting meetings and secret video conferencing with our European friends
Golf boys presidency will be defined by his response to ISIS over the next two years. Speaking of ISIS no school is safe, no city, town, mall, store or large gathering is safe from their need to make a splash. The only way to effectively combat them will be total warfare the likes of which we have not seen since fighting the Axis powers in the 40’s. Another thing, we will have to seek barbaric retribution against ISIS individuals by annihilating their families...the only way they will capitulate is through extermination.
ISIS is not Al Qaeda. They are a small guerrilla army. As it is, they are on the verge of stretching themselves too thin and falling apart. What Obama is doing only gives them strength.
ISIS may have made a fatal mistake, when they beheaded that journalist. The media doesn’t like when that happens. Obama depends on the MSM to provide him cover — therefore Obama doesn’t like when that happens either.
Basically the strategy is to contain it until it can be defeated some time in the future when it’s more convenient.
People call Obama an isolationist. I think it's not a bad idea to have these countries bear most of the cost of defending themselves. If they look like they're about to lose, we can always jump in. The reason that we have always been reluctant to join overseas wars is the same reason everybody else is reluctant. Wars take a toll on the nation's finances and the lives of our young men, even if they are not physically injured or worse. If we had jumped in early in both WWI and WWII, our butcher's bill would have been far higher than it turned out to be. Ultimately, foreign countries should bear most of the cost of defending themselves - after all, it's not our lands that are in danger of being overrun.
That’s the opposite strategy of what it should be.
Well, we should have partitioned Iraq. Why do we need to respect borders the British made up decades ago, when they just won’t work. That’s on Bush as well as Obama. And we needed to let Maliki know he had something to lose if he pushed the Sunnis so hard war was inevitable.
NO cheers, unfortunately.
Don't blame me. I voted for Palin.
And, God forgive me, Romney, even though it was he whose minions shafted Palin.
Even Jimmuh Dhimmi Carter would be an improvement at this point...
The partition of India involved sectarian massacres and a year-long border war. Partitioning Iraq and leaving sounds like a panacea, but it would simply have kicked off today's conflict a decade earlier. Bush wanted to appear a statesman rather than a Vandal or an anarchist. My guess is that the same brain trust that had him appoint Karzai and Maliki would also have given him a hard time if he had simply partitioned Iraq and left.
It's only in hindsight, after 8 years of troubles in Iraq, that partition seems like a good idea. At the time, the country seemed like it might hold together without too much work on our part. The politically-incorrect truth is that we simply did not kill enough of Iraq's combat-age men during major combat operations. We needed to kill the whole snake rather than merely cut off its head. When Germany and Japan surrendered, they were all fought out. Between 1/8 to 1/4 of their (18-28) young men were dead. Many of the rest were shell-shocked or wounded. That, rather than any epiphany, was why we had so little postwar trouble with them. They had had enough. Major combat ops in Iraq were over in the blink of an eye. What we saved on the front end, we paid on the back end, and then some.
Now that we know that the so-called “moderate” Arab states, like Kuwait are not really our friends, and have been funding terrorism for years, why did we even bother when Saddam invaded Kuwait?
For the same reason we sided with the Soviets against the Nazis. This isn't Star Wars, where a monolithic Rebel Coalition goes up against an equally monolithic Empire. The threats to our interests (and the interests of just about any state throughout history) come from not one or two, but literally dozens of countries and alliances. Saddam was the greater of two evils, which is why we restored the emirate of Kuwait. Poland wasn't exactly a paragon of Anglo-Saxon virtues when Germany invaded, but the threat from an enlarged Germany was sufficient to get Britain to declare war.
Note that Britain declared war on Germany, but not the Soviet Union, which had also invaded Poland. It was clear that they considered the Nazis the lesser of two evils and set their diplomatic policy accordingly.
It's called "escalation." LBJ invented it.
Then, after a few years, they blamed the VietNam War on Nixon.
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