O realli?
For Christ's sake! Doesn't anybody study history???
Stop calling ISIS a "terrorist group"! They're an enemy army! You have to destroy them or they will prevail.
And by "destroy them", I mean this:
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.
Interesting perspective.
The leader of ISIS high tailed it out of Iraq
www.worldtribune.com/2014/08/21/isil-commander-flees-syria-u-s-steps-air-strikes-iraq/
ISIL’s Al Baghdadi flees Iraq for Syria as U.S. steps up air strikes
Special to WorldTribune.com
LONDON — The commander of Islamic State of Iraq and Levant was said to have fled Iraq amid U.S. air strikes on Kurdistan.
Officials said ISIL commander Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi left his headquarters in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul around Aug. 10. They said Al Baghdadi, a nomme de guerre, fled from Iraq to neighboring Syria as Iraq and the United States intensified air strikes on ISIL positions.
Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi
Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi
“According to our intelligence sources, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi traveled to Syria as part of a convoy of 30 Hummer vehicles after fearing being targeted by U.S. airstrikes,” a senior Kurdish official, Said Zinni, said.
Zinni, spokesman of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, said Al Baghdadi left Mosul around Aug. 10. He said several of Al Baghdadi’s top commanders have been killed in the Kurdish offensive.
In a statement to the London-based newspaper A-Sharq Al Awsat, Zinni did not identify the dead ISIL chiefs. He said Kurdish forces, called Peshmerga, were succeeding in halting ISIL’s advance through Kurdistan as well as in the Diyala province to the south.
Officials said ISIL was moving its fighters out of northern Iraq to Syria amid an air campaign by NATO. They said at least four NATO states were supplying the Kurds with a range of weapons and ground platforms.
“Whoever has authorization from ISIL is transferred to areas near Mosul,” a Kurdish source said. “Others are sent to the fighting in Syria after three days of military training at the Kindi training camp.”
The latest Western state to send arms to the Kurds was identified as France. Officials said the French military delivered heavy weapons expected to be used by Kurdish forces.
“We are still waiting for more weapons from our allies,” Kurdish Security Ministry spokesman Brig. Gen. Halgurd Hikmat said.
Maybe the Nobel Peace Committee should hold an emergency executive meeting to do some “reconsidering”?
Bull! He did it to win an election, period! He ignored his military generals and intelligence. And He telegraphed it all for the enemy! It’s absolutely disgusting what that jerk did after all our troops’ blood sweat and tears ....and victory .....spent there! Iraq became a crucial ally in a horrible part of the world. Whether we like it or not, we needed to keep a strong presence there to keep the terrorist element from taking hold and to watch Iran and Syria. It takes more than a few years or a decade for a war torn nation to get back on their feet completely. We still have troops in Europe and Japan! You cannot simply go into a shell...there is no freaking isolation. We weren’t there for Iraq, we were there for the United States. We were there for many strategic reasons...and for a foreign policy that used to be there for OUR protection - not the Obama policy of protecting Islamists. That said, Bush really mishandled the whole thing from the get-go. His second term was embarrassing.
The Bush administration at its worst was many time better than the current regime at its best. I think that mistakes were made in Iraq but things were mostly not as bad as they were made out to be. The media constantly finding fault with every little thing that happened under Bush drove a lot of the negative public perception of the war in Iraq. I think that if a democrat president had been in charge during that time the Iraq mission would have been proclaimed a resounding success and our troops would probably still be there. The press did more to hurt the mission there than any jihadi ever did.
O realli?
For Christ's sake! Doesn't anybody study history???
Stop calling ISIS a "terrorist group"! They're an enemy army! You have to destroy them or they will prevail.
And by "destroy them", I mean this:
They are nit small, nit just guerrillas. They are 59,000 string with more Sunnis joining. They have set up their own state with sophisticated welfare, administration and revenue generation. They are a real state
If it’s so great, then why don’t you move there.?
What BS! The calculus that got Obama out of Iraq is Obama wanting to be out of Iraq at all costs. Period. Whatever Obama used as a pretext is irrelevant. Now he’s realizing that Presidents, no matter what they feel about it, are forced sometimes to act contrary to all they originally wanted due to actual events. Of course, he had no sympathy toward events that foisted a certain set of choices on George W.! And the minute he got elected he got working undoing all the good that George Bush did in Iraq at a tremendous cost.
Obama is not going to war. If he does the moonbats will burn down the White House. The Navy has planes on call if the drones get into something to big to handle.
All he can do is order very selective and limited engagement to define the Kurdish and Shia borders. That is all he is going to do. He will use some moonbat acceptable drones and NSA signals interception.
He has lost the effectiveness of special forces because his dithering led them to nothing. They are now subject to false intel and a trap.
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