Shaved Monkey wrote:create a problem
fix a problem
create another problem
fix another problem
create another problem
.....rinse and repeat
great for the war industry,and a good bonding diversion from reality.
Ya, I get ya.
It's definitely yet another lesson in blowback. Old Seagypsy was right way back in the Syria chem weapon thing and SG was talking about how horrible these ISIS are. I wonder if weapons we got to "moderate" rebels aided ISIS in any way.
What a complex mess. We fought Assad a bit by proxy,
so that must have helped ISIS, now ISIS is our enemy. And we may be working with Iran and even some really hardcore US enemies -- forget his name, there is one guy that was part of al queada or something but he's got blood American blood on his hands and now we're somehow going to be working with him (sorry I'm so foggy on that, was just something I saw on CNN).
A part of our new strategy will be to aid the moderate rebels more, in Syria.
According to CNN, there are thousands of US marines with ships, ready to go. And thousands of US paratroopers.
So anyway, it's blowback:
1. After our Iraqi invasion and occupation, we disbanded all the Baathists and banned them from the new Iraqi army and power structure. Guess we should not have done that. The million man army we US taxpayers built up just wound up running anyway.
2. The Baathists are with ISIS now. Same darn people we were fighting before, though they are more deadly now with this batshit crazy Saladin caliphate leadership.
3. Is ISIS our own blowback? Did US actions, in Iraq, in Syria, inadvertently *create* them? The same thing happened with AQ, that came from jihadis we armed and funded and used to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
So who should we even have been siding with in Syria, Assad? Yes he's a dictator and bad, but, the ISSI are frickin' WORSE. So wtf. What side are we on here. It's a mess.
And -- it was clearly a mistake to LEAVE Iraq entirely, Obama was wrong on that and Democrats were wrong too. It would have been easier to have a residual force that could have stomped this out early, now we need a massive operation to go back in again and it's a war again.
In conclusion:
If someone wants a war with the USA, a sure way to get it is to attack the American people. We don't like it. Folks will flip from dove to hawk on a dime. Right now, Obama's approval rating is actually abysmal, on foreign policy. He's too dovish, Americans are hawkish again.
Rationally, those beheadings were 2 people. It's not a 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. But still, we don't like it, we will not take it, you can't go on TV doing this to Americans and expect nothing to happen.
Also, it isn't BS about ISIS, they really are a more serious threat than AQ:
1) They have a country, tax revenue, oil wells, they're making a caliphate
2) They're the best funded terrorist group in history (Europeans paying them hostage ransom doesn't help matters)
3) A lot of them are European, or even American, jihadis. The one that was on tv, he's British. All of these guys will come home eventually, and they've got passports. They're said they're going to attack the US, and the UK, and the idiots have threatened Putin too. So they must be seriously nuts.
4) Every independent objective journalist / analyst I've read, has said ISIS are flat out psychopaths worse than AQ. They are really are bad news, and do have to go, but what I'm asking in this thread is -- shouldn't we have stayed in Iraq in the first place, some residual force.
And have you anti-war folks learned that the world doesn't work that way, it's not peace and rainbows. You guys made such a huge thing about "Bush's war in Iraq," now it's "Obama's war in Iraq" with another coalition of the willing -- will you be so anti-war now? Just pointing out some hypocrisy here.
It is a fact that if we listened to Dick Cheney, if we had left enough residual force behind, if Obama hadn't pulled all out, then we wouldn't have this worse enemy in Iraq right now.And lastly, we do also need to reflect on blowback and how this ISIS got so strong to begin with. So I see all sides to it, I know we created AQ to fight the Soviets, now it's looks like ISIS is another one like that and more blowback coming back to bite us. OTOH they are really bad news and we do have to stomp them out.