Slashdot Mirror
New US Airstrikes In Iraq Intended to Protect Important Dam
U.S. military involvement in Iraq is heating up again; the sudden rise of the organization known as the Islamic State has put a kink in the gradual, ongoing winding down of U.S. military presence in that country, and today that kink has gotten a little sharper. From The New York Times: The United States launched a fresh series of airstrikes against Sunni fighters in Iraq late Saturday in what Defense Department officials described as a mission to stop militants from seizing an important dam on the Euphrates River and prevent the possibility of floodwaters being unleashed toward the capital, Baghdad. The attacks were aimed at militant fighters of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as they were moving toward the Haditha Dam, officials said. The operation represented another expansion of the limited goals that President Obama set out when he announced last month that he had authorized airstrikes in Iraq.
Celebrating diversity!
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
all the money and weapon ISIS has all came from American govt.
its US tactic to create instability in Middle-East to gain control over oil there.
Strange, when we gave them all those weapons in Syria they were "freedom fighters"!
If Saddam was still in power, he would be major american ally in "fighting terrorists". Orwell would laugh his ass out if he lived to this day.
839*929
Maybe because news in those countries regarding the Palestian-Israeli war is not one sided ? Even as a non muslim I sometimes have questions how that state operates. Like this week annexing >400km of land for settlers as a form of punishment or a documentary that I saw about a 6 years old boy that needed to go to a military court because a settler saying he threw a rock to him. The story about a brave Israeli that escort palestian children on certain routes so they don't get attacked by settlers.
And the reality is that there are hundred of those kind of stories and it is just completely nuts and a good breeding ground for terrorists... .
I have the feeling that 80% of the hatred for the "west' is targeted to the US and the UK. For the US that has a lot to do with the fact that is some kind of lapdog for Israel. The Uk's problem is that it is the lapdop of the US.
You can believe all the fluffy stories that is because of the "hatred for freedom" or that we in Europe are all anti-semitic, but the reality is that for 9/10 homegrown terrorist the US position is the enemy because it is mainly driven because of a wealthy influential lobby from the us.
No, I mean the "struggle" in the failed state of Iraq. The rest of your frothy babble has nothing to do with the topic at hand, which is Iraq.
It looks like you need an adult to explain things to you.
Who armed Saddam? - Some reality checks
Saddam's weapons came overwhelmingly from the Soviet Union & other Soviet Bloc countries (69% during this period), followed by France (13%) and China (12%) and a string of smaller suppliers. (For example, according to a 1984 SIPRI report, "During 1982-83, Iraq accounted for 40% of total French arms exports.") The figure for the US is 1%.
(The link above is a good bit of background that covers much more than that short extract.)
There are still a lot of Soviet Bloc weapons being used in Iraq. The Interior ministry stuck with AKs, and the armed forces were only partly rearmed with American and Western weapons.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Hello, when you refer to Americans please don't conflate a meddling, incompetent President with Americans in general. Most Americans did not actually vote for that guy, he's lost most credibility in the US and among allies and other countries around the world. Thanks.
Dear Leader Obama sure is struggling now. Deja vu? He's announced another Coalition of the Willing in Iraq&Syria. It's getting harder and harder to spin that "No boots on the ground" statement he made. It's just another lie in his pathological lying ways.
The US supports democracies that value liberty and freedom as best we can.
I respectfully disagree. The US naturally supports its own interests wherever it can. United States support of authoritarian regimes. No matter how bad Sharia law might be the Islamic State guys are tired of foreign interference. They've had enough of everything that's happened after Sykes-Picot and they want the right to self determination. It's no wonder they have so much internal support.
Hello, when you refer to Americans please don't conflate a meddling, incompetent President with Americans in general. Most Americans did not actually vote for that guy, he's lost most credibility in the US and among allies and other countries around the world. Thanks.
Technically, no American president has been voted for by "most Americans" since large swaths of the people have been excluded from voting for various reasons (age, gender, race, or ethnicity, depending on the time period). But your attempts to reference the current president fall short since he got the overall majority of the vote in both elections (52% in 2008 and 51% in 2012).
2012 General Election Turnout Rates, Voting-Age Population, 240,926,957, The final popular vote totals were 65,899,660 for Obama-Biden;
65,899,660 / 240,926,957 = 27.3%, pretty blantant that most Americans didn't vote for Obama. In fact with Obama's margin of only 4,967,508,that's close to expected voter fraud rates, it's hard to say how many votes he actually won by.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds