We have to take out these armored Humvees and other american equipment with air strikes now, in fact that should have been done immediately. And we must stop arming these groups in Syria, bad as assad is there are worst alternatives.
What a flamingly idiotic comment on multiple levels. Well done.
Well said and I concur.
What a staggeringly misguided and stupid suggestion.
Are you shitting me? You think the people of Iraq donât know their own history having lived it?
Talk about arrogance writ large.
Once again, there is no actual thought put into this except âDo something, with bombs.â What is the endgame to this new intervention? How do we enforce any agreement with Maliki to open up his government? And if does enter into an agreement with the U.S. does he not immediately become suspect in his countrymenâs eyes? Does dropping more ordinance on the Sunni Triangle really end the threat from ISIL or merely push them underground until we leave again? Or are we supposed to put troops in there indefinitely? You claim we need a long term strategy, but of course offer nothing except to condemn the President, much like the McCain wing of the Republican party.
Please show me why you think he went off to pout. He does not strike me as a pouter.
Well said and I concur.
I said temporarily âstabilizeâ till we devise a long term policy (and you flamed me) and Radical Centrist said âmanage and controlâ until âthe Sunnisâ ?! decide on action (and you concurred).
I guess you didnât understand my point.
I started by saying the U.S.needed to stabilize till we have a well-thought out endgame which might even not include Maliki, I noted specifically. That was my whole point, no need to attack my individual words without trying to understand their context.
strong text[quote=âRadicalCentrist, post:42, topic:5454â]
I have no problem calling ISIS evil. Their acts are.
[Who the hell gives one shit about the semantics of name-calling? Who are you writing to?]
So is the Kim family, but no one seriously proposes invading North Korea or even sending drones.
[No relevance at all, OBVIOUSLY.]
We will just have to manage and contain these guys
[I said stabilie situation temporarily so you are agreeing with me exactly.]
until the Sunni Iraqis decide to act against them.
[Speculative, and assumes facts not in evidence while ignoring larger context. ]
Right now, they tolerate them because Maliki ignored their interests. I am not so sure that the Sunnis will accept any central Iraqi government which will inevitably be Shiite-dominated, because they care 60% of the population.
[You use too many pronouns and and relative adjectives so I have no idea what you are saying. If you mean Sunnis are 60% of population youâve got it reversed.]
So really, we are looking at the Biden tripartite autonomous regions solution a we have to hope that the Sunnis, who experienced reasonably modern life under Saddam, will gravitate towards a Saddam-light rather than Islamist loons once they are assured of being able to run their own affairs,
[All speculative and aspirational. Could be great, but as I said the U.S. needs a rational long-term strategy. Could be your model or another.]
Sounds a little like our old Somoza1 brand of foreign policy âhe may be a son-of-a-bitch, but heâs our son-of-a-bitchâ âŚall over again.
Or Churchill.
I said âstrong leader,â you gratuitously decided that he must be a Somoza. Abusive mood today?
Is Iraqâs government worth the lives of US troops? Should we spill American blood and spend American treasure to support a government that (1) wonât fight its own battles and (2) acts in ways that cripple its ability to lead?
If locals fight for their interests in a just cause â and need help, I am prepared to offer it. Neither circumstance applies today. The government of Iraq is not fighting for its interests and does not represent a just cause.
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Actually that is the only thing I disagree with Radical Centrist over in his comment. 90% of which is, this isnât our fight and âIraqâ and basically being a tripartite partitioning (but in the end it is up to the âIraqisâ). So Radical Centrist and I part ways over us having to âmanage and controlâ if it means anything more than material and/or rear echelon, small footprint (I would argue mandatory out-of-country, i.e. Kuwait or SA) training up posts. Possible overflight and/or drone air-cover.
I said yesterday I could be swayed to support a big move along the lines of managed establishment of a Kurdistan in the north if we could get Turkey to see it is in their long-term interest as well. The rest, not really our fight.
The same price we were ultimately willing to pay for for the future of South Vietnam. In the end, absolutely noting that mattered to politicians and policy makers, or brass hats. The ones who paid too much for nothing are (as usual) the guys and gals who did the bleeding, and the dying.
Now, another Nation that we âbought and paid forâ the hard way is falling apart. I say we have paid enough. As a matter of fact, the American people should go after certain well known political families in this country, right alongside the connected corporations with no bid contracts who swindled the American people. The American people ought to start demanding that money back, to care for the people whom the brass hats told to go, and bleed, and die. Of course, it will never happen, because America has no more spine these days than some of the people that lead the pathetic third world nation into which America has transfigured itself.
So the next time this happens, (and there will be a next time, because America never learns the easy way) I donât want to hear anymore caterwauling like this article. Americans knew this event was coming, just like in 1975 Saigon. Now that its happening again, you want me to be shocked and outraged?
OK, I will be. For the people who made the sacrifices and who live with those sacrifices everyday. or try to, with not enough help from anybody anywhere in the Nation for which they bled.
âForeign policy?â âNational Security?â Sorry, no soap. All of that was, and remains,100% rubbish!
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When did Iraqis show this?
Not another drop of blood for the debacle of Bush.
I love this revisionism about the âsurge.â The surge was working!
Well, the surge was 2007, fellas. Bush was President until 2009. If the surge was so successful, why did 70% of America want to get the hell out of Iraq when Barack Obama ran on it?
The surge was working! The Easter Bunny told me so!
It beggars belief that nowhere in this article does Breen mention the Sykes-Picot agreement that is at the heart of the ethnic tensions in modern Iraq.
It demonstrates something typical of our officer corps, which I say sadly as an Army veteran myself: Most are utterly lacking in any historical grounding. We have great firefighters in our army, officers and NCOs who know how to handle the immediate crises before them, but are utterly incapable of understanding the bigger picture, or simply unwilling to do so. Breen should perhaps stick to firefighting and stay away from attempting to analyze.
Many commenters have already made great points about the lessons to be learned from our past interventions and invasions. I particularly like the comment that we ought to leave them to their own devices so that in some years they become trading partners, like the Vietnamese.
I would like to ask Breen why he thinks the ISIL would even consider attacking the United States at home. I agree they would like to strike American targets, IF we were stupid enough to give them targets. In Iraq.
Someone has already effectively demolished Breens contradictory reasoning in claiming the borders there mean nothing to the people there (mostly true) and for this reason we should help prop up those very borders in Iraq. Um, what?
Coming back to Breenâs ahistoricity, he says âWe must resist the temptation to view the current situation through the lens of past and bitter debatesâ, again demonstrating his total incapacity to think farther back than ten years. Mr. Breen, it is precisely because we never had a real debate that we ended up in Iraq. It is precisely because we collectively refused to consider the first Bush administrationâs decision not to remove Saddam Hussein and their reasons for that decision, that we ended up with a seven year quagmire. Letâs see, invaded Iraq in 2003. First Gulf War was in 1991, so yeah, thatâs about right. 1991 was just outside the limit of American historical thinking so naturally no one considered what would happen when you took down the strongman ruler of a country in which the minority sect ruled over the majority sect.
What pent up resentments, festering since 1916 (Sykes-Picot again) would blow up in our faces if we casually and stupidly dismantled their army, and made all those breadwinners unemployed.
Back to ISIL attacking us at home. So a few thousand Sunni fanatics, in the middle of a civil war in Iraq (if they succeed in overthrowing Malikiâs government), fighting for their very lives as Iran pours in support for Shiites in Iraq, is somehow going to find the time and energy to come bomb Kansas City. Or something.
Come on, Breen. Really. You have to do better.
Breen, you should learn the term âsunk costsâ. It comes from economics. Sunk costs are costs we have already paid and cannot recover. For instance, our brothers and sisters who died in Iraq. We paid a heavy price (well, not âweâ. They did.). Theyâre gone and nothing will bring them back. Sending more to die there so we can justify the deaths of those we sent before is the height of military and strategic idiocy. (See Battle of Ypres, 1917. Generals telling their political masters, "Just 10,000 more men and weâll break through.)
Some Sunnis hate some Shiites. Many Sunnis and many Shiites donât really care much about sectarian differences. But the psychotic minorities in each sect are willing to kill and die forâŚwell, whatever it is religious fanatics want to kill and die for.
So I say let them. If they really are just tiny minorities of each sect, then the majorities will be able to handle them, as the Sunni Awakening did with Al-qaeda in Iraq. If not, well, let 'em kill each other. My oath was to protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. It most definitely wasnât to protect Sunnis from Shiites, or Shiites from Sunnis, or Kurds from both, and so on, ad nauseum.
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In what world are you living? Iâm not asking sarcastically. I really want to know. Does ISIL have some secret ICBMs stashed away some where that we donât know about? Is there some secret ISIL clone army on some secret floating base that we havenât discovered?
An existential threat is a threat that can overthrow a government and occupy a nation. For instance, the way the Japanese did to Korea. Or the way we did to Japan and Germany. The way the Moors did to Christian Spain for 900 years. The way the Germanic tribes overthrew the Roman empire. THATâS an existential threat.
A bunch of yahoos, however dangerous and willing to kill they may be, who canât actually invade us are not an existential threat.
You said above that Liberals are afraid to call out evil. I called them evil. Are you happy? Now what?
Of course itâs relevant. There are lots of evil people and we canât make war against all of them. So we have to choose. Is Iraq worth it? I say no. You seem to be saying yes and I disagree with you.
No itâs Shiites who are 60%. Which means a democratic unitary national government will inevitably be Shiite-dominated. Will the Sunnis ever accept that? Saddam (a Sunni) managed to grab national power and hold it, but the Shiites today are strong enough today to prevent that (and Iran certainly would). Hence, a tripartite division seems the most feasible solution, where each group can run their own region.
ISIS is in charge in that area FOR NOW. I believe that behind them are various Baathist, ex-Saddam Generals who will, in short order, take charge in the Sunni areas. In the interim, ISIS is just another terrorist group. They are not an âexistential threatâ to the US. 9/11 wasnât an existential threat to the US. It wasnât even an existential threat to Lower Manhattan, which seems to be doing just fine these days. Killing 3,000 people, as awful as it is, doesnât cause a country of 300,000,000 to cease to exist. Hell, the Black Death wiped out 25% of many countries in Europe all of which continued to exist. Now, asteroids ARE an existential threat. We ought to invest more in monitoring them and developing rockets to alter their course than in fighting terrorism.
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