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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
This struggle will be going on for decades (if we're lucky, longer if not), until the extremists get tired of it and want to live in peace. Until then any talk of "ending the war" is as silly as claiming you can tear down a dam because the river stopped flowing. It stopped flowing because of the dam. Tearing down the dam while the water is still there will have the obvious consequence.
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
You're right. Like the Democrats they tend to lean more towards using bombs.
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.
Strange, when the Obama administration gave them all those weapons in Syria they were "freedom fighters"!
I fixed that for you.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
It's not 2003 any more. Iraq has a democratically elected government, and has for about 10 years now. The Iraqi army was rebuilt and rearmed with large amounts of weaponry. ISIS is mainly coming from Syria, not Iraq. You've got this pretty much wrong.
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
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
I think this is a simple case of "you break it, you buy it".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Here's a bit of news for you: there are Muslims of every race. If your explanation of things centers around "brown people" in some fashion you completely misunderstand the issues.
And yes, ISIS does exist. It is an offshoot of al Qaida.
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.
Why are you bringing GW Bush into the conversation?
It's not 2003 any more. Iraq has a democratically elected government, and has for about 10 years now. The Iraqi army was rebuilt and rearmed with large amounts of weaponry. ISIS is mainly coming from Syria, not Iraq. You've got this pretty much wrong.
Bullshit, you can't just reduce this to Weapons. Weapons are only as good as the people who operate them and they are only as good as those who lead them. Everything that has happened in Iraq since 2003 has been influenced by American meddling. Ibrahim al-Jaafari was replaced as Prime Minister of Iraq after the Bush White House became displeased with him due to his inability to curb the insurgency (which was not surprising in view of the fact that the army had been disbanded and some of the best troops had joined the insurgency). Iraq may have had democratic elections but the selection of parties and candidates available for election was carefully engineered by the USA and the same goes when it came to choosing which people occupied key government posts. Eye witness accounts of the search for a successor to al-Jaafari reminded me of the Praetorian's hunt for a new Roman emperor after the demise of Caligula. Having no idea who to replace Caligula with they finally found Claudius hiding behind a curtain and made him emperor and the US had given no more thought to who would replace al-Jaafari than the Pretorians had done when they disposed of Caligula. Finally the White House just chose Nouri al-Maliki, next best guy they could find without having any idea of how capable he was or whether he'd be an inclusive leader or a divisive one. The White House knew so little about al-Maliki that they mispronounced his name until he personally corrected them. Al-Maliki was so inexperienced he had to get weekly tutorial sessions from George W Bush Jr over video link (talk about dub leading dumber). It is this choice that is now coming back to bite the Obama administration along with it's own lack of interest in what is happening in Iraq. Yes the army was trained, yes the Sons of Iraq effort created a chance at reconciliation and yes It was al-Maliki, America's chosen man who de-Sunnified the government and civil service, it was he who fired all the US trained officers and replaced them with militarily inept cronies to coup-proof the army and it was his sectarian policies who sparked the campaign of repression that eventually led to the 'ISIS invasion' which in reality is a full blown Sunni revolt. Iraq today is very much America's mess and that is why the Europeans may be willing to join in the fight against ISIS by helping the Iraqi Kurds and possibly the YPG in Syria but they will remain unwilling to touch Iraq proper with a 16 foot pike. That's America's mess and it will have to be America who deals with it along with (irony abounds) Iran.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
They annexed slightly under 100 acred or 4 sq km. Nothing remotely like 400. Seems your not one-sided news is not so good after all.
Iraq had a majoritarian government not a democratic government. Democratic governments represent the public interest. Iraq's government represented a sects interests. And not shockingly another sect is now rejecting that government.
It's absolutely not true that all money and weapons came from USA. ISIS simply seized the weapons of the regular Iraqi military. While there were some American weapons in that cache, which the western TV networks love to display, most of the weapons they got were Soviet or Russian. And in fact, the Soviet/Russian weapons are the deadliest weapons that ISIS has. The American weapons are very high tech and very expensive to maintain (think about toys like M1 Abrams tank), while the Soviet weapons were designed to be rugged, easy to fix, and easy to operate.
Next onto the money, the Islamic State has always received covertly support from conservatives circles in the Gulf Sunni states (Saudi Arabia, UAE, etc). This is where they got most of their money and import fighters initially. And now ISIS gets a whole lot of money simply by selling oil or crudely refined oil products on the black market. So neither one of your claims is true. Sorry.
Drown a few hundred thousand. What's the worst that happens? The liberals blame the Jews?
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.
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