Posted on 08/12/2014 9:27:36 PM PDT by Rabin
What Happened to the Peshmerga?
Without a doubt, one of the biggest and most disturbing surprises of the past week was the seeming ease with which ISIS fighters defeated Kurdish Peshmerga forces, seizing several towns in northern Iraq, the Mosul Dam, and even threatening to advance on Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). All of this has conveyed an impression of Kurdish weakness very much contrary to the accepted wisdom that the Peshmerga were more than capable of defending their lands.
(Excerpt) Read more at brookings.edu ...
R.
Peshmerga are amazing and courageous.
I don’t have time to read it now, but I do know they were running low on ammunition and that ISIS is now better armed in most cases. That’s going to change very soon.
A very good read, Rabin. Thanks.
What the writer failed to mention is the CIA and the US military trained many of the current ISIS troops. They may have been in other radical Islamic groups when we trained them in Jordan over the last 3 years, but today they are in ISIS. Which means the reason for their military success is they are CIA/US trained. So how is the US going to defeat an army they trained and armed is going to be very interesting. Imagine, Obama is going to train and supply an army to defeat another army he trained and supplied. i wonder what the Russians think of Obama now. Putin must be scratching his head wondering why Obama is so pissed at Ukraine when Obama is playing both sides of this fence in Iraq and Syria.
The thing is that Obama is playing both sides of the fence in Ukraine.
If Obama were a true leader, Russia and its puppet states would have been declared terrorist states by now with sanctions that rival those on North Korea and Iran. Also, the Chinese would have gotten sanctions on them for hacking our systems and for taking some of the Spartly islands, as well as assisting Russia in sanctions busting. We would also be building up our military in those regions to stop Russia and China cold. And, ISIS would be in the dustbin of history, blown off of the face of the earth.
The peshmerga were running low on ammo. Hopefully they’ve been replenished. Unlike the craven chickenshits in the Iraqi “army,” the peshmerga don’t run from a fight.
Very good article. I didn’t read in absolute detail. Was anything said about the value of ‘intelligence activities’? When IS first attacked the Kurds said they could get info from a few Arab tribes about IS’s movements. Then it stopped because according to Peshmerga IS started to pay the Arab tribes to keep their mouth shut or threatened them. Anyway, Pesh are pretty tough. Am sure with right support and weapons they’ll prevail.
Pollack is credited with persuading liberals of the case for the Iraq war. New York Times columnist Bill Keller, in supporting the Iraq war in 2003, wrote “Kenneth Pollack, the Clinton National Security Council expert whose argument for invading Iraq is surely the most influential book of this season, has provided intellectual cover for every liberal who finds himself inclining toward war but uneasy about Mr. Bush.”[2] Liberal writer Matthew Yglesias in the LA Times also attested to Pollack’s influence:
“. . .Of course, those of us who read Pollack's celebrated 2002 book, “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq,” and became convinced as a result that the United States needed to, well, invade Iraq in order to dismantle Saddam Hussein's advanced nuclear weapons program (the one he didn't actually have) might feel a little too bitter to once again defer to our betters. [3]
You never train to your “A” game....
the stupid, stupid Washington D.C. beltway crowd
what did we do, beginning over a decade ago?
with a “regime change” agenda against Assad in Syria
we repeated our errors of the 1980s in Afghanistan
we “subcontracted” the ground game to our so-called “friends” in the region, who promptly recruited the most politically organized internal opposition in Syria, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, to supply the core of the leadership and planning of a “coalition” ( including good and fair minded naive “moderates” brought along as useful idiot fellow travelers and from whom to garner western support), while the Brotherhood sent the call out to their own Islamist fellow travelers in the region to join them in Syria.
There were “moderates” in the Free Syrian Army but the real ground game was always determined, politically, by the core of the “coalition” which was always dominated by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.
It is not for nothing that the city of Homs is again a prominent location of “Syrian opposition” as it has been in the past. It is and always has been the home of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and it is THAT fact that has always brought the city into civil conflict with the secular administration in Damascus. That conflict in the past was always sold to the west by our so-called friends in the region as a mere “civil uprising” by Syrian citizens, when each time it was always a secular administration putting down an Islamist putsch originating from Homs.
It is no secret that Assad is not well liked in uber-religious, uber-Conservative places like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, but it is NOT because he is a dicatator, as are all the heads of state of the aforementioned states, but because to them Assad is an apostate not worthy of any respectful (uber-fundamentalist like them )Sunni to have to live under.
Assad is no “good guy”. Neither are any of our so-called friends in the region, outside of Israel.
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