[WildRose]

Here is what seems to me a very cogent description of our failure in Iraq.

It’s the oil, stupid! Insurgency and war on a sea of oil
h/t Resilience

Hey, thanks for that link, Pops.

It sure makes sense to me.

[Keith_McClary]

MIKE WHITNEY thinks it's a divide and conquer strategy:

It could be that Washington, Tel Aviv and Riyadh –who we think are the driving force behind this current wave of violence–have a much more ambitious plan in mind for the future. If this new method of effecting regime change succeeds, then the sky’s the limit. Maybe they’ll try the same stunt in other countries too, like Turkey, Tunisia, Cyprus, and all the way to North Africa. Why not? If the game plan is to Balkanize Arab countries wholesale and transform them into powerless fiefdoms overseen by US proconsuls and local warlords, why not go on a regime change spree?
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/24/ ... vade-iraq/

[Fishman]

Preston, thanks for posting the pictures of Bush. It keeps reminding us of what a leader is and does, even with one's inperfection, as opposed to the clueless ones, where EVERYTHING falls apart.
"Isn't this a dream come true for the GOP? (as opposed to the Libs nightmare, where nothing they do works, and the world just laughs at them) They haven't quite figured out how to cheer for ISIS I guess(as opposed to the Libs who can't even figure who they are, and don't understand why Twitter doesn't stop wars) I mean, the usual GOP response to terrorism is to demand the overthrow of the US government.(??? as opposed to Libs who call it "man made disasters" and staunchly defend our killers)"

[ROCKMAN]

Keith - All well and good to have our surrogate Praetorian Guard doing our dirty work if, in fact, it is true. But then there comes the point when you have no one to protect you from the Praetorians themselves. I'm sure there are multiple hidden (and some not so invisible) agendas out there. I'm just not convinced that anyone has really much direct control over events. Some minimal effects perhaps. But the BIG PLAN and CONTOL? I just don't see it. The world seems to have become almost purely reactionary. Day 1...there's the plan. Day 2...the plan turns to sh*t and we start improvising. And except for marines almost no one is very good at improvising...especially govts.

[Timo]

Keith - All well and good to have our surrogate Praetorian Guard doing our dirty work if, in fact, it is true. But then there comes the point when you have no one to protect you from the Praetorians themselves. I'm sure there are multiple hidden (and some not so invisible) agendas out there. I'm just not convinced that anyone has really much direct control over events. Some minimal effects perhaps. But the BIG PLAN and CONTOL? I just don't see it. The world seems to have become almost purely reactionary. Day 1...there's the plan. Day 2...the plan turns to sh*t and we start improvising. And except for marines almost no one is very good at improvising...especially govts.

You forgot McGuyver.

[Sixstrings]

"You mean the leader of ISIS is even MORE ANTI-AMERICAN than Osama bin Laden?"

That's actually the truth!

ISIS is too brutal even for AQ, and they had a falling out.

By the way, their sheer hardcore brutality may actually prevent them from forming the caliphate they want. Though they've got oil fields now, and territory, and forming a gov and collecting taxes. Hard to say, but could be that Iraqi sunnis won't really like how hardcore they are.

In Syria, they roll into towns and start chopping hands off.

(here's the thing, this radical islam stuff is like a sliding scale. It actually *can* be even worse than a AQ, or bin Laden)

And funny video. We build a million man army there, $25 billion, and what was it a trillion spent on the war or whatever and we leave all these humvees over there and now ISIS just takes it all and the Iraqi army we built are all running away in terror. A million man army versus 25,000 jihadis, and they all ran.

Let's hope ISIS doesn't have fighter pilots, seeing as how the US sent F-16s and choppers and all that too.

[Keith_McClary]

Keith - All well and good to have our surrogate Praetorian Guard doing our dirty work if, in fact, it is true. But then there comes the point when you have no one to protect you from the Praetorians themselves. I'm sure there are multiple hidden (and some not so invisible) agendas out there. I'm just not convinced that anyone has really much direct control over events. Some minimal effects perhaps. But the BIG PLAN and CONTOL? I just don't see it. The world seems to have become almost purely reactionary. Day 1...there's the plan. Day 2...the plan turns to sh*t and we start improvising. And except for marines almost no one is very good at improvising...especially govts.

Yeah, once you start intervening in other countries, and your plans go awry , you take what friends you can get. That usually turns out to be some opportunistic treasonous thug who can parrot your slogans in passable English. And when that goes bad, you dump him and switch to some other faction. Repeat until chaos.

Gilbert Mercier concludes:

Down the line, Iran’s military involvement could grow. The ISIS crisis will also be an opportunity for Assad’s troops, with the help of Hezbollah, to maintain their momentum. Those who should be most concerned about the Jihadists’ blitzkrieg in Iraq might be ISIS’ own biological fathers: the kings and sheiks of the Gulf States. If ISIS takes Baghdad, who can stop the Jihadist march on Doha (Qatar), Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), or even Amman (Jordan), in a most unwelcome return of the prodigal son.

[ROCKMAN]

"MIKE WHITNEY thinks it's a divide and conquer strategy:". Of course there's those nasty unintended consequences such as by dividing your enemy you now have two instead of one. Or 4 instead of 2. Or 8 instead of 4? Like Iraq Sunni, Baghdad Shia, Syrian Sunni, Iranian Shia, eastern Ukrainians, Kiev Ukrainians, Somali Muslims, Lebanese Christians, etc. etc. etc. You know if you eventually sh*t in all your neighbors' backyards you're not going to get invited to the bbq's. LOL.

[Keith_McClary]

Of course there's those nasty unintended consequences such as by dividing your enemy you now have two instead of one. Or 4 instead of 2. Or 8 instead of 4?

[Keith_McClary]

Iraq buys Russian jets to ‘destroy the terrorists’ dens’ after long delays waiting for U.S. F-16s

Iraq has bought used fighter jets from Russia and Belarus to battle Islamist militants after long delays in the delivery of F-16 planes from the U.S. left troops without air support, Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki said.

The jets “should arrive in Iraq in two or three days,” Al-Maliki said.

“God willing within one week this force will be effective and will destroy the terrorists’ dens,” he said.

Al-Maliki, in an interview with BBC Arabic, blamed the U.S.’s “long, very slow way” for delaying the delivery of 36 aircraft.

“I’ll be frank and say that we were deluded when we signed the contract [with the U.S.],” Al-Maliki said.

“We shouldn’t have just bought U.S. jets, we should have bought British, French and Russian jets to provide air support. If we had air support, none of this would have happened.”

The U.S is delivering the first two F-16 aircraft “as quickly as possible” and has said all along that they’ll be handed over in the fall, Army colonel Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters in Washington. He also said that the remaining 200 of 500 Hellfire missiles approved for delivery to Iraq will be sent in the coming weeks.

And the Iraqi F-16 pilots will be trained by next year.
(ISIS only controls those thin red lines ??? - it would look much worse if they coloured the surrounded spaces red.)

[Keith_McClary]

Iraq crisis: Kerry to meet with Saudi king, seeking Sunni Arab restraint
Christian Science Monitor (quoting entire article)

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State John Kerry will pay an emergency visit to Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Friday amid signs that smoldering tensions and diverging interests in US-Saudi relations are being further exacerbated by the crisis in Iraq.

In the run-up to his stop in Riyadh – a last-minute add-on to his week-long trip to the Middle East and Europe – Mr. Kerry has been imploring the region’s powers to refrain from entering the Iraqi fray in ways he says could cause the conflict to deteriorate into a full-blown sectarian war.

In particular, he is encouraging the region’s Sunni Arabs to tamp down their harsh public criticisms of Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and to press Iraq’s Sunni tribes to reject the country’s Sunni insurgency, which has aligned with the advancing Islamist extremist group, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS).

“We’ve made it clear to everyone in the region that we don’t need anything to take place that might exacerbate the sectarian divisions that are already at a heightened level of tension,” Kerry said Wednesday, warning against actions that he said “could act as a flashpoint with respect to the sectarian divide” between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

Yet while Kerry emphasizes the need for regional unity against extremist forces like ISIS, the region’s Sunni Arabs, and the Saudis in particular, worry more about Shiite Iran – whose influence they see growing, and whose interests they fear are increasingly aligned with those of the US.

In Paris Thursday, Kerry met with the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan – all Sunni Arab nations – encouraging the Gulf states in particular to work to dry up the moral and financial support that ISIS has garnered in the region and increasingly among Iraq’s Sunnis. With the help of an array of Iraq’s Sunni insurgent groups, ISIS now holds large chunks of northern and western Iraq and is vowing to move south to take the multi-sectarian capital of Baghdad.

The progress of ISIS “concerns every single country here,” Kerry said as he opened the meeting with the Sunni Arab foreign ministers.

The US has let Saudi Arabia know that actions it has taken – such as its call last week for Mr. Maliki to step down – are not helpful. But the Saudis, still smarting over President Obama’s decision last summer not to launch air strikes against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for its chemical weapons use, see Iraq as one more arena where Saudi and US interests appear to be diverging.

With the US sending several hundred military advisers to Baghdad to help the Maliki government try to stave off the advancing threat of Sunni insurgents, the region’s Sunni Arabs – including Saudi Arabia – see the US jumping in on the side of a Shiite regime that for years has marginalized Iraq’s Sunnis.

Added to that concern is the larger worry that the Iraq crisis is putting the US on the same side as Iran, which is sending both personnel and equipment across the border into Iraq to bolster the Shiite-led regime.

The result, some regional experts say, is that the region’s Sunni Arabs see the US, wittingly or not, abetting a rise of Iranian and Shiite influence.

A recent trip to the region revealed “just how much the Gulf Sunnis think the US-Iran rapprochement is a done deal,” says Karim Sadjadpour, a senior associate and Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

The Iraq crisis is only the latest factor contributing to new doubts in the region about relations with the US, Mr. Sadjadpour says. The Gulf Sunnis “think they are fighting the same adversaries [as the US] but [that] they are not allies.”

The result, he says, is a reversal in US-Saudi relations to a point where the two are “friends but not allies” on key events in the region, while those same events – notably the intertwined Syrian and Iraqi conflicts and the rise of ISIS – seem to increasingly make the US and Iran “allies but not friends.”

Looking forward, Sadjadpour says, “I see that trend line continuing.”

That’s the context that Kerry – who last week raised the prospect of the US and Iran cooperating on Iraq – will confront when he meets with King Abdullah in Riyadh.

One question Kerry is almost certain to hear: Under what conditions would the US resort to air strikes against Iraq’s insurgents? For the Saudis, it’s a question that probes just how far US-Iranian “cooperation” might go, some regional experts say.

The US faces “the perception that we’d essentially be propping up an Iranian-backed sectarian Shia government,” says Dalia Dassa Kaye, director of RAND Corp’s Center for Middle East Public Policy in Washington.

Kerry says he will also broach the state of the Syrian conflict with the king, but the issue of Syria also presents pitfalls for the US.

Kerry says he will discuss the common US and Saudi interest in supporting Syria’s moderate opposition. In Washington, perhaps signaling the US commitment to such common interests, the Obama administration announced it was seeking $500 million from Congress to “train and equip appropriately vetted elements of the moderate Syrian armed opposition.”

Nevertheless, Kerry’s conversation is bound to get to the threat posed by ISIS. And putting the emphasis on the Sunni extremists could turn off the Saudis, Ms. Kaye says, because it sounds like the US is coming around to the position that Mr. Assad, an Alawite Shiite ruling over a majority Sunni country, has espoused since the beginning of the war.

“This is what the Assad regime was looking for” all along, she says, that the world “see the Sunni extremists as the bigger threat” in Syria. The growing alarm over ISIS, including from the US, “really fits Assad’s narrative,” she says. “In the near term, that seems to be coming to pass.”

[PrestonSturges]

Iraq buys Russian jets to ‘destroy the terrorists’ dens’ after long delays waiting for U.S. F-16s

Iraq has bought used fighter jets from Russia and Belarus to battle Islamist militants after long delays in the delivery of F-16 planes from the U.S. left troops without air support, Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki said.

The jets “should arrive in Iraq in two or three days,” Al-Maliki said.

They are probably getting the cheap Russian ground attack planes, which are exactly what they need. They don't need air superiority fighters, they need the subsonic-trainers-with-beefed-up-airframes equipped for ground attack. They could buy planes like that anywhere, and the pilots don't need to go to Top Gun school to fly crates like that.

[PrestonSturges]

John McCain as the godfather of ISIS

http://www.theatlantic.com/internationa ... ar/373181/

[Keith_McClary]

More Gong Show:
http://www.newsweek.com/maliki-governme ... ars-256353

[Sixstrings]

John McCain as the godfather of ISIS

http://www.theatlantic.com/internationa ... ar/373181/

There should be some congressional hearings on that one.

What, exactly, did the US gov do to aid ISIS.

And I was right originally, we needed to use the good ole US military that we pay so much for, to handle it. And not give a bunch of weapons to psycho jihadis to do a proxy fight against Russia in Syria. *The same darn crap we did in Afghanistan, in the 80s!* *Which directly led to 9/11!* *And now we'll have a BIGGER war on terror, with terrorists we armed, yet again!*

Would have been better to use our military, in Syria. That's what our army and navy are for. Better them than give weapons to terrorists.

[ROCKMAN]

The nomenclature seems to betting rather bizarre IMHO: Syria’s moderate opposition, Sunni terrorists, Shia security forces, Syrian terrorists, Iranian-backed sectarian Shia government, moderate Syrian armed opposition, elements of the moderate Syrian armed opposition, Sunni extremists, sectarian Shiite forces, Alawite Shiite, Islamist militants, etc. It's as if some folks envision a giant chess board with distinct playing pieces each with static and predictable functions in this "game". All very handy when sitting around the planning table in Washington and conducting a press conference. Brings back sad memories of McNamara and his boy wonders using mathematical formulas to show how the US would prevail in Vietnam.

Ahhh...if life were really that simple.

[americandream]

The oil regions of the ME are undergoing the same re-organisation as the former USSR region....the mopping up of the last remnants of anything resembling progessive thinking (even remotely so) to be replaced by economic liberals in East Europe (or in the case of the ME), pro-Saudi forces.

[ROCKMAN]

Another example of how picking allies in this cluster f*ck will become increasing difficult:

Reuters - "It was supposed to be a routine job, police say. Move 69 prisoners from an outlying town to a jail in southern Baghdad. But before they arrived at their destination, every single prisoner had been killed. The official account given hours after the killing on Monday by the governor of Hilla, 92km (57 miles) south of Baghdad, was that militants had attacked the convoy killing 10 prisoners and one policeman in the crossfire. "The convoy protection force fiercely responded to the terrorist attack," Governor Sadiq Madloul told reporters. But a police captain, a second police officer and a senior local official from where the prisoners died in Hilla, all speaking on condition of anonymity while giving an account that differed from the official line, told Reuters no attack took place, and the police had executed the 69 men. A third police source who would not contradict the account that the convoy had come under attack nevertheless confirmed that all 69 had been killed and said some had not died in the crossfire but were gunned down to prevent them from escaping.

The deaths in Hilla came less than a week after the killing of 52 prisoners in Baquba, a regional capital north of Baghdad. The police account there also was that the prisoners had died in the crossfire during a battle with insurgents. But local Sunni officials including the mayor and the provincial governor, medical staff at the morgue and relatives of the dead all said the victims were gunned down in their jail cells. Iraq's government has long denied it summarily executes prisoners. Following a Reuters report on police executions in March, army spokesman Sa'ad Ma'an said: "If it happened, whoever committed it will be investigated, held accountable and sent to a military court." Ma'an and other Iraqi government spokesmen did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the latest killings outside Hilla.

Unlike the Iraqi government, Sunni insurgents from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant make no attempt to hide mass executions of prisoners: they proudly proclaim that Shi'ites are heretics who must die, and boast of the killings. Days after they began sweeping through northern cities on June 10, they released videos showing their masked fighters machine gunning captive government soldiers lying in shallow graves. On Friday, Human Rights Watch said ISIL had executed at least 160 people in Tikrit this month. But the reports that government forces loyal to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki are also executing prisoners are becoming more regular as the conflict intensifies, calling into question Washington's stepped-up military support for the Shi'ite premier."

Hmm...in that Hatfield/McCoy thing...who shot who first? Never mind...doesn't really matter does it?

[Plantagenet]

Obama escalates things another step....armed US drones now deployed in Iraq

US Drones now deployed over Baghdad


Freedom is not an accident. Progress is not an accident. Democracy is not an accident. These are things that have to be fought for. Barack Obama (2014)

[Sixstrings]

The nomenclature seems to betting rather bizarre IMHO: Syria’s moderate opposition, Sunni terrorists, Shia security forces, Syrian terrorists, Iranian-backed sectarian Shia government, moderate Syrian armed opposition, elements of the moderate Syrian armed opposition, Sunni extremists, sectarian Shiite forces, Alawite Shiite, Islamist militants, etc.

Funny post, Rock