Al Qaeda Flag Flies over City Where Marines Fought Largest Battle of Iraq War

Mediaite ^ | Friday, January 3, 3014 | Noah Rothman

[kristinn]

Just over two years since American troops entirely withdrew from Iraq, the black flag of Al Qaeda flies over the city of Fallujah’s government buildings in Iraq’s western Anbar Province. It was there that several American contractors were killed and strung up over a bridge in 2004 and American Marines fought the biggest battle of the Iraq War.

“The capture of Fallujah came amid an explosion of violence across the western desert province of Anbar in which local tribes, the Iraqi security forces and al-Qaeda militants have been fighting one another for days in a confusingly chaotic three-way war,” reads a report in the Washington Post.

From the WaPo article:

...“At the moment, there is no presence of the Iraqi state in Fallujah,” said a local journalist who asked not to be named because he fears for his safety. “The police and the army have abandoned the city, al-Qaeda has taken down all the Iraqi flags and burned them, and it has raised its own flag on all the buildings.”

At Friday prayers, held outdoors and attended by thousands of people, a masked ISIS fighter took the podium and addressed the crowd, declaring the establishment of an “Islamic emirate” in Fallujah and promising to help residents fight the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his Iranian allies.

“We don’t want to hurt you. We don’t want to take any of your possessions,” the masked man told the crowd, according to the journalist, who attended the prayers. “We want you to reopen the schools and institutions and return to your normal lives.”..

[freepersup]

Just announced per Fox News- hellfire missiles and eagle eye drones are on the way to Iraq.

[lentulusgracchus]

Invading Iraq was the biggest blunder is US foreign policy history.

No, it wasn't. Saddam was a major sponsor of terrorism, which by 2003 was rapidly coming to be seen as a risk-free form of sub rosa statecraft. Remember, too, that Saddam had tried to assassinate Bush 41 out-of-office when he traveled to Kuwait to receive the grateful thanks of the emirates for the Gulf War. Saddam had come up as a professional assassin and gunsel, and he was applying his methods and attitudes to international politics.

The same people criticizing Bush and Rumsfeld over the Iraq War are the same ones who'd have said the same things if we'd moved in 1937 to kick Hitler out of the Rhineland and public office and nip World War II in the bud.

Oh, and Bush gave us ethanol and banned Edison light bulbs too.

Blame Archer-Daniels-Midland, its CEO Dwayne Andreas, and his army of K Street bag men for ethanol, and Dingy Harry and Nancy the Red and their neo-Stalinist Red/Green orcs for the incandescent-light ban.

[lentulusgracchus]

Those drones are toys. Little bitty things, in no way comparable to Global Hawk and its ilk.

[tet68]

I knew this headline was coming as soon as Obama was
elected, I’d seen it before only then it read,
“North Vietnamese armored forces enter Saigon
occupy former American embassy.”

[lentulusgracchus]

And GWBush got Obama elected, so it was all for nothing.

Ping to my last, and no, Dubya did not get Obama elected. GOP-E moneybags who sat out the election in the expectation that Hildebeast would be the nominee and oblige them by

• Standing at the bottom of the hill while the Giant Financial Derivatives Smashup fell on her watch and
• Passing some kind of Sovietcare to get them off the hook for their employees' health care plans

sat on their moneybags and waited out the election, and prepared to wait out the four following years while Beastwoman did the dirty work and got the blame.

There are a lot of people among the superrich who understand that if your net worth declines 30%, it's worth it if everyone else's declines 75%, their bargaining power disappears, and everyone in the country has to defer to you and KYA because you're the only guy left with any cash.

They like that.