Iraq & Syrian Civil Wars - Page 201

President Obama said tonight he has authorized air strikes if necessary to protect American interests in Iraq.

If the terrorist group ISIS, which is taking over parts of Iraq reaches Erbil, the president said he will call in US air strikes to protect American interests. The US has an embassy and other staffers in the city. Obama says will not allow US to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq and combat troops will not return.

The US sent cargo planes to drop pallets of humanitarian aid and supplies to stranded Iraqi citizens threatened by the militant Islamic group ISIS, U.S. officials said today.

The airdrop mission has been completed, the president said in a statement from the White House.

On August 08 2014 09:29 Sermokala wrote:

The peshmerga welcomed the us invasion of the country and have been nothing but apreciative to the help we gave them. They're loseing faith in the combined iraqi state for good reason. They've been treating the minorities a hell of a lot better then ISIS has done and better then the iraqi government can do for them. Their bad side comes out in force when it comes to syrian and turkish affiars with their kurdish minorities in those areas.

Their bad side comes out in force when it comes to syrian and turkish affiars with their kurdish minorities in those areas.

The foster parents of Isis and the other Sunni jihadi movements in Iraq and Syria are Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchies and Turkey. This doesn’t mean the jihadis didn’t have strong indigenous roots, but their rise was crucially supported by outside Sunni powers. The Saudi and Qatari aid was primarily financial, usually through private donations, which Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, says were central to the Isis takeover of Sunni provinces in northern Iraq: ‘Such things do not happen spontaneously.’ In a speech in London in July, he said the Saudi policy towards jihadis has two contradictory motives: fear of jihadis operating within Saudi Arabia, and a desire to use them against Shia powers abroad. He said the Saudis are ‘deeply attracted towards any militancy which can effectively challenge Shiadom’. It’s unlikely the Sunni community as a whole in Iraq would have lined up behind Isis without the support Saudi Arabia gave directly or indirectly to many Sunni movements. The same is true of Syria, where Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former Saudi ambassador to Washington and head of Saudi intelligence from 2012 to February 2014, was doing everything he could to back the jihadi opposition until his dismissal. Fearful of what they’ve helped create, the Saudis are now veering in the other direction, arresting jihadi volunteers rather than turning a blind eye as they go to Syria and Iraq, but it may be too late. Saudi jihadis have little love for the House of Saud. On 23 July, Isis launched an attack on one of the last Syrian army strongholds in the northern province of Raqqa. It began with a suicide car-bomb attack; the vehicle was driven by a Saudi called Khatab al-Najdi who had put pictures on the car windows of three women held in Saudi prisons, one of whom was Hila al-Kasir, his niece.

Turkey’s role has been different but no less significant than Saudi Arabia’s in aiding Isis and other jihadi groups. Its most important action has been to keep open its 510-mile border with Syria. This gave Isis, al-Nusra and other opposition groups a safe rear base from which to bring in men and weapons. The border crossing points have been the most contested places during the rebels’ ‘civil war within the civil war’. Most foreign jihadis have crossed Turkey on their way to Syria and Iraq. Precise figures are difficult to come by, but Morocco’s Interior Ministry said recently that 1122 Moroccan jihadists have entered Syria, including nine hundred who went in 2013, two hundred of whom were killed. Iraqi security suspects that Turkish military intelligence may have been heavily involved in aiding Isis when it was reconstituting itself in 2011. Reports from the Turkish border say Isis is no longer welcome, but with weapons taken from the Iraqi army and the seizure of Syrian oil and gasfields, it no longer needs so much outside help.

On August 07 2014 23:47 JudicatorHammurabi wrote:
Did the Iraqi army disband again or something? They've become quite a laughable and undisciplined force since they became "US-trained" (which says enough). They go from defeating Islamic history's greatest jihad and the scariest crisis to face the Arabs and Israelis, to being overrun by some primates. lol

At least there was some good news from yesterday:

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/08/06/374310/240-isil-militants-killed-in-iraq/

Also, for the record since people are pretty new to things having to do with the Mideast, peshmerga are not exactly good guys. They're traditionally anti-Iraqi insurgents/terrorists. They're only fighting ISIS because ISIS is encroaching on them personally, not because they care about what's happening to Iraq. Anytime there's crisis they'll try to assert independence or w/e, fanatics attempting to represent otherwise normal Kurdish folks. Fortunately this time around, their hands are pretty tied down with these Islamic terrorists. But funny enough, desperate times make for unlikely allies, but I'm sure anyone who knows anything about history knows that.

On August 08 2014 19:08 zatic wrote:
It's probably the first time the US is bombing the Middle East where practically no one will complain.

On August 08 2014 19:20 Derez wrote:
Even then its a half-a-loaf decision like Obama seems to continuously make them. From what's reported he only authorized air strikes to protect the cities where there are Americans, and to drop some food/water while claiming that 'America is coming to help'. Such a joke.

On August 08 2014 20:48 Derez wrote:
It's complete incompetence and bad analysis. Obama's foreign policy doctrine at this point is mainly whining about how he can never catch a break. Bush handled the middle east very poorly but you can't say Obama is doing much better. Over the past few years there were a number of points where the US could have tried to make a difference in the Middle-East to contain IS (not letting Assad + Putin run circles around them, fund the FSA, leave a number of troops in Iraq somehow, start airstrikes earlier).

American inaction shows itself on a global scale as well, it's perceived as weak, unwilling to act and having lost all control over setting a global agenda. This while the US still is the only global superpower, and (following Kagan's piece) when a superpower retires the world starts slowly burning. I'm all for dropping food but its a failure of massive proportions that it even got to this point.

On August 08 2014 21:28 Gorsameth wrote:

Oh come on.
1) the US is war weary. The people don't want another way so popular support is impossible to attain. Esp after the train wreck that was Iraq.
2) The only way to do more then some airstrikes is to put boots on the ground. At no point in history has invading the middle east ever worked out for anyone. You cant destroy something like ISIS with a war. Best cast scenario you beat their armies, kill a few important people and they flee back admits the civilian population and disappear for a couple of years before their right back at it.
3) Suppose you go and kick ISIS then what? Your going to occupy half of the middle east for a century while their culture sorts itself at gunpoint? Are you going to leave right away? cause that just means it all blows up again the moment your gone.
You can stay a little while ofc but then what? constant guerrilla attacks, steadily growing resentment for the population until they force you to leave and then the next shit comes out of hiding and kicks up another storm? Oh wait we just had that in Iraq...

Sad tho it may be there is no good answer to dealing with the conflict in the middle east. The entire region is held together only by the might of individual warlords and dictators to fuck up anyone who doesn't listen to them. You cant just impose glorious democracy on them. Shit don't work like that, we should know, we have been trying for a while now.

On August 08 2014 21:44 Laserist wrote:
I'd say a good majority of the people commenting here is analyzing the situation wrong or partially wrong due to looking the situation from another planet. As a very close resident to middle-east(Turkey), the political sides and their actions are very different, and the motives are not as many posters referred.

Even if the United States faced no immediate danger of military attack, Roosevelt argued, if Hitler, Mussolini, and Imperial Japan were allowed to have their way, the world would be a “shabby and dangerous place to live in—yes, even for Americans to live in.” America would become a “lone island” in a world dominated by the “philosophy of force.” The “institutions of democracy” would be placed at risk even if America’s security was not, because America would have to become an armed camp to defend itself. Roosevelt urged Americans to look beyond their immediate physical security. “There comes a time in the affairs of men,” he said, “when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments, and their very civilization are founded. The defense of religion, of democracy, and of good faith among nations is all the same fight. To save one we must now make up our minds to save all.”

Other Bush advisers, however, led by Brent Scowcroft, saw things differently. Saddam’s invasion, they believed, was “the first test of the postwar system.” For half a century the United States had taken the lead role in deterring and punishing would-be aggressors. Although driving Iraqi forces out of Kuwait would be “costly and risky,” Scowcroft feared that failure to do so would set “a terrible precedent—one that would only accelerate violent centrifugal tendencies—in this emerging ‘post-Cold War’ era.” Appeasement of aggression in one region would breed aggression elsewhere. To President Bush, it was all reminiscent of the 1930s. This time, he recalled in his memoirs, “I wanted no appeasement.” Speaking to the American people on the eve of war, Bush described American objectives not in terms of national interests but in terms of a “new world order,” in which “the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations.” Much like Roosevelt in 1939, he argued that “a world in which brutality and lawlessness are allowed to go unchecked isn’t the kind of world we’re going to want to live in.”

The United States, in short, was the “indispensable nation,” as Bill Clinton would proclaim—indispensable, that is, to the preservation of a liberal world order. Such was the thinking behind most of Clinton’s foreign policy initiatives: the enlargement of NATO, which included the extension of unprecedented military guarantees to such nations as Poland, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic states; the billions sent to try to save Boris Yeltsin’s faltering democratic experiment in Russia; and the intense focus on containing North Korea, Iraq, and Iran, designated as “rogue states” because they defied the principles of a liberal world order. Conflicts in remote and troubled parts of the world were not considered irrelevant to American interests but were viewed within this broader context. After the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995, Clinton officials argued, according to David Halberstam, that “Serb aggression” was intolerable— not because it threatened American interests directly, which obviously it did not, but because it tore at “the very fabric of the West.”