[Withnail]

I don't know what the answer is, withnail. Yes war is horrible. Worse thing about the Iraq war is if the lefty sources on that are right -- that a million Iraqis died, because of that, most of it indirectly. But look at Syria right now. Even if you do nothing, things get to be a mess. Something like 3 million refugees.

America and its proxies created the mess in Syria by supporting insurgent/terrorist groups.

[Plantagenet]

Obama's strategy is devilishly clever. All we have to do is blow up all the Muslims who don't like us, leaving behind the friendly Muslims in every country we bomb

[Withnail]

Obama's strategy is devilishly clever. All we have to do is blow up all the Muslims who don't like us, leaving behind the friendly Muslims in every country we bomb

There's no way anything can go wrong with this new plan of dropping bombs on the Middle East, that's for sure.

[Plantagenet]

Obama's strategy is devilishly clever. All we have to do is blow up all the Muslims who don't like us, leaving behind the friendly Muslims in every country we bomb

There's no way anything can go wrong with this new plan of dropping bombs on the Middle East, that's for sure.

Obama said he is picking every target himself. He will decide which Muslims are good and which Muslims are bad. Then, using precision weapons, Obama will blow up the bad Muslims. Look at todays strike---in addition to the bad Muslims in ISIS, Obama spotted some other bad Muslims belonging to another group, and blew them up too.

[Sixstrings]

Look at todays strike---in addition to the bad Muslims in ISIS, Obama spotted some other bad Muslims belonging to another group, and blew them up too.

It's just law enforcement, Texas Ranger style. But with Air cav.

Muslims are just people, same as Americans are, yes there are some bad muslims -- ISIS-- that Obama's coalition is going after. Think Texas posse, everyone gets together and rides on out to smoke 'em out and clear out those comanche that've been scalping folks.

It's like this -- not all indians were bad indians, but the comanche were brutal, and feared by other indians.

Not all Americans are bad Americans, but some of them are, and government must go after them too. That's law enforcement.

In the case of ISIS, the terrorist that beheaded the American hostages -- is British! Does that mean all Brits are bad? Of course not. Not even all British muslims. But some of them are, yep.

Just try to get beyond equivocation -- suggesting there's no difference between muslims to start with, and then that infers we aren't justified in our war against ISIS. We are the good guys in this. We will not abide terrorist attacks on us, and our people beheaded, and ISIS had a plot to *behead Australians in Australia*, we have to fight them.

It's like comanche in the 1800s, what are you going to do just "understand" them and they raid your farms and scalp your kin and kill everyone? Jesus, no, you get a backbone and you fight them.

The coalition governments are the good guys in this, too. They are civil society too, in opposition to this terrorism and chaos and crucifixions, mass executions and rape that ISIS is doing. Jordan doesn't want frickin' ISIS rolling over their border, and they sure as heck don't want any ISIS radicalizing their sunni and we don't want that either.

The American coalition are the good guys in this. It's civil society standing up, and driving out the mad max jihadi mongol horde.

(no offense meant to modern day indians and mongolians, with my historical analogies -- those comanche were badass though, and the mongol hordes were too, and settled law-abiding society had to fight them -- you can't be weak and just let these ISIS run amok and build a caliphate and start crossing the Turkish border, and the Jordanians, and the Saudis, and attacking frickin' Australia too, and who knows what else. They have to be fought.)

[Keith_McClary]

It's like comanche in the 1800s, what are you going to do just "understand" them and they raid your farms and scalp your kin and kill everyone?

Good analogy.

Or like the natives attacking the innocent Euro-American settlers in Palestine, South Africa, etc.

[Sixstrings]

America and its proxies created the mess in Syria by supporting insurgent/terrorist groups.

Yes, you have a point, but it's not like US allies listen to everything the state department tells them. These are *alliances*, there is US *leadership* but the US is not the boss of a Britain or a Qatar.

When this coalition was getting together, the United Arab Emirates was saying it's really not fair that the Qataris were funding ISIS to start with and now everyone has to go fight them. So Qatar joined the coalition, that's actually really good, this is the US leading from behind a little bit and it working out and we're providing some guidance and encouraging responsible arab governments to join together and handle problems like this ISIS.

We'd really rather they be handling it, versus it always being another American war over there and kids from Kansas in Fallujah. It really should be these arabs. They're all our allies, we sold them all their hardware and planes, we trained them, so it's time to step up.

Just as Europe should be stepping up with Ukraine and it not HAVE to be all the US.

Really Withnail, the American Atlas is trying to pull back on all of these things and get you other guys to step up and start handling your regional problems.

So anyhow -- it's a good thing this coalition is together, now they are all working with the US and working together so now maybe the other arabs will talk to the qataris and tell them to clean it up and cut it out with whoever had been funding ISIS.

[Keith_McClary]

They're all our allies, we sold them all their hardware and planes, we trained them ...

so all those unpopular kings, emirs, sultans and dictators could keep themselves in power. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time.

[Sixstrings]

so all those unpopular kings, emirs, sultans and dictators could keep themselves in power. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time.

You guys are so difficult.

For goodness sake, the King of Jordan is not hatching plots to behead Australians in Australia.

ISIS is.

[Keith_McClary]

so all those unpopular kings, emirs, sultans and dictators could keep themselves in power. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time.

You guys are so difficult.

For goodness sake, the King of Jordan is not hatching plots to behead Australians in Australia.

ISIS is.

The point is, why are you over there, originally, historically? Because you used up (or exported) most of your oil and wanted to get control of theirs. You have to expect to deal with some pissed-off natives.

(Yes, I know, it was to spread freedom and democracy. )

[Plantagenet]

, why are you over there....(Yes, I know, it was to spread freedom and democracy.

No, thats not it.

Obama says we are bombing Syria because ISIS and the other group were plotting to attack the homeland, so we have to attack them first.

[SeaGypsy]

Jesus WTF has gone on here the last few months? Die hard lefty 6 has woken up to what a bunch of scum hard core Muslims are while Planty thinks we should take the old lefty line and just stay out of it.... Weird.

9 months back most here thought I was losing the plot ranting about Muslim atrocities becoming a serious problem. Just because I don't rely on CNN for my news I was way ahead of the curve on these sub humans. Now it's all over CNN, and a couple of naive lefty yanks got their heads very publicly removed, the world is paying attention. It's been building for ages this stuff.

The last few days are the first time I have approved Obamas strategy & action in the ME. Hunt the f' down wherever they are and smash them to blazers. Arrest and deport or permanently detain their supporters. About time.

BTW I just had one of the best holidays in my life, in Indonesia, a country which learned the hard way what kind of damage unrestrained extremists can do, not just to others, but to their own. The strategy of working with moderate governments of Islamic countries is the only one making any sense. If only these thoughts had been influencing policy before the gulf wars things may have been very different.

[Keith_McClary]

Jesus WTF has gone on here the last few months? Die hard lefty 6 has woken up to what a bunch of scum hard core Muslims are while Planty thinks we should take the old lefty line and just stay out of it.... Weird.

9 months back most here thought I was losing the plot ranting about Muslim atrocities becoming a serious problem. Just because I don't rely on CNN for my news I was way ahead of the curve on these sub humans. Now it's all over CNN, and a couple of naive lefty yanks got their heads very publicly removed, the world is paying attention. It's been building for ages this stuff.

The last few days are the first time I have approved Obamas strategy & action in the ME. Hunt the f' down wherever they are and smash them to blazers. Arrest and deport or permanently detain their supporters. About time.

BTW I just had one of the best holidays in my life, in Indonesia, a country which learned the hard way what kind of damage unrestrained extremists can do, not just to others, but to their own. The strategy of working with moderate governments of Islamic countries is the only one making any sense. If only these thoughts had been influencing policy before the gulf wars things may have been very different.

Where were you back when the heroic Islamic Mujahideen in Afghanistan were armed and financed by the rightists?

[Withnail]

so all those unpopular kings, emirs, sultans and dictators could keep themselves in power. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time.

You guys are so difficult.

For goodness sake, the King of Jordan is not hatching plots to behead Australians in Australia.

ISIS is.

Why do Islamists based in Australia need to go to Syria to hatch plots to behead Australians in Australia?

[Sixstrings]

(Yes, I know, it was to spread freedom and democracy. )

No, Saudi Arabia was for the oil.

Isn't it Europe that uses Saudi oil, anyway? We're all domestic supplied over here / importing from Venezuela, so, when we keep middle east stability and order -- at US taxpayer expense -- it's really to keep the oil coming to all these Europeans that are so ungrateful and hating us anyway!

Just so mixed up, all of it, French and Germans like to drive but they'd never do what it takes to keep the spice flowing. And all they do is throw peanuts at us, from the peanut gallery.

NYT was right, "an ungrateful world."

[Sixstrings]

Why do Islamists based in Australia need to go to Syria to hatch plots to behead Australians in Australia?

From what I read the Aussie ISIS guys were going to send the videos to ISIS in Syria for the ISIS propaganda wing to take it from there.

I haven't read all the details on it -- like, were the aussie ISIS radicalized over the internet, did they join up themselves or was this a ISIS recruitment thing from Syria. And how much command and control was coming from ISIS in the middle east, to their cell in Australia.

Withnail you don't seem to be taking this very serously -- you've got 500 brits that got radicalized and went to join ISIS, and in France 700 of their muslims went to ISIS. And now, apparently Australia had a problem with it too, which nobody expected.

[Withnail]

Withnail you don't seem to be taking this very serously -- you've got 500 brits that got radicalized and went to join ISIS, and in France 700 of their muslims went to ISIS. And now, apparently Australia had a problem with it too, which nobody expected.

I'm not worried about getting my head cut off by Islamists, to be honest.

More chance of winning the lottery.

Anyway, the prospective head choppers are in Syria now.

[Withnail]

Just so mixed up, all of it, French and Germans like to drive but they'd never do what it takes to keep the spice flowing. And all they do is throw peanuts at us, from the peanut gallery.

NYT was right, "an ungrateful world."

The oil was flowing perfectly fine before America decided to start blowing up the MIddle East in 2003.

Iraq was even selling oil in euros, which was handy.

[Plantagenet]

...the prospective head choppers are in Syria now.

Actually they also chop off heads in Saudi Arabia and several other Muslim countries. Cutting off heads is part of Sharia Law.

The problem isn't that Muslims following Sharia Law chop off heads---the issue is good Muslims vs. bad Muslims. Its perfectly acceptable for good Muslims to chop off heads. The problem arises when bad Muslims chop off heads. As Obama just said at the UN, ISIS and some other Islamic groups in Syria are killers, so we must kill them

[Keith_McClary]

Apocalypse Now, Iraq Edition - Fighting in Iraq Until Hell Freezes Over
By Peter Van Buren

As someone who cares deeply about this country, I find it beyond belief that Washington has again plunged into the swamp of the Sunni-Shia mess in Iraq.

The Sons of Iraq
Sometimes, when I turn on the TV these days, the sense of seeing once again places in Iraq I’d been overwhelms me. After 22 years as a diplomat with the Department of State, I spent 12 long months in Iraq in 2009-2010 as part of the American occupation. My role was to lead two teams in “reconstructing” the nation. In practice, that meant paying for schools that would never be completed, setting up pastry shops on streets without water or electricity, and conducting endless propaganda events on Washington-generated themes of the week (“small business,” “women’s empowerment,” “democracy building.”)
...
In 2006, the U.S. brokered the ascension to power of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shia politician handpicked to unite Iraq. A bright, shining lie of a plan soon followed. Applying vast amounts of money, Washington’s emissaries created the Sahwa, or Sons of Iraq, a loose grouping of Sunnis anointed as “moderates” who agreed to temporarily stop killing in return for a promised place at the table in the New(er) Iraq. The “political space” for this was to be created by a massive escalation of the American military effort, which gained a particularly marketable name: the surge.
I was charged with meeting the Sahwa leaders in my area. My job back then was to try to persuade them to stay on board just a little longer, even as they came to realize that they’d been had. Maliki’s Shia government in Baghdad, which was already ignoring American entreaties to be inclusive, was hell-bent on ensuring that there would be no Sunni “sons” in its Iraq.
False alliances and double-crosses were not unfamiliar to the Sunni warlords I engaged with. Often, our talk — over endless tiny glasses of sweet, sweet tea stirred with white-hot metal spoons — shifted from the Shia and the Americans to their great-grandfathers’ struggle against the British. Revenge unfolds over generations, they assured me, and memories are long in the Middle East, they warned.
When I left in 2010, the year before the American military finally departed, the truth on the ground should have been clear enough to anyone with the vision to take it in. Iraq had already been tacitly divided into feuding state-lets controlled by Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds. The Baghdad government had turned into a typical, gleeful third-world kleptocracy fueled by American money, but with a particularly nasty twist: they were also a group of autocrats dedicated to persecuting, marginalizing, degrading, and perhaps one day destroying the country’s Sunni minority.
...
And then came the Islamic State (IS) and the new “caliphate,” the child born of a neglectful occupation and an autocratic Shia government out to put the Sunnis in their place once and for all. And suddenly we were heading back into Iraq.
...
The truth on the ground these days is tragically familiar: an Iraq even more divided into feuding state-lets; a Baghdad government kleptocracy about to be reinvigorated by free-flowing American money; and a new Shia prime minister being issued the same 2003-2011 to-do list by Washington: mollify the Sunnis, unify Iraq, and make it snappy.
...
On a 36-month schedule for “destroying” ISIS, the president is already ceding his war to the next president, as was done to him by George W. Bush.