Posted on 06/12/2014 6:30:34 AM PDT by kristinn
At a closed-door gathering of Gulf states in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in May, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and his Arab counterparts all signaled agreement on one thing for the first time: Islamist forces seizing territory in Syria and Iraq had become a regionwide menace that can't be ignored.
What they didn't agree on was what to do about it, U.S. officials said.The fall this week of the Iraqi cities Mosul and Tikrit to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham rebel group shows how the insurgent threat is outpacing the response and posing a challenge to President Barack Obama's approach of limiting U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts.
The quickly unfolding drama prompted a White House meeting Wednesday of top policy makers and military leaders who were caught off guard by the swift collapse of Iraqi security forces, officials acknowledged.
State Department and Pentagon officials have long warned about ISIS's desire to create an Islamic state based in the Sunni-dominated parts of Iraq and Syria.
Now, current and former officials say Washington's options for helping the Iraqi army fight back are limited—both because the threat in Iraq is so entrenched and because the U.S. hasn't invested in building up moderate allies on the Syrian side of the border.
SNIP
Some military officials now believe ISIS is the single greatest terrorist threat the U.S. and its allies face—stronger than the al Qaeda affiliates in Yemen or Africa and far more powerful than al Qaeda's central leadership in Pakistan. Other senior U.S. officials say ISIS has yet to carry out any attacks directly targeting the U.S.
"It makes you want to kill yourself," a senior U.S. official said of the intelligence on ISIS, which was presented by U.S. and Gulf allies during the May meeting in Jeddah.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Prediction: The formerly great US military will be dragged, nilly-willy, into this conflict, and will be mired much worse than ever happened in Viet Nam. With even less capability and freedom of the commanders on the ground to move in positive manner to protect themselves and strategically engage the enemy, it will turn into a rout that would make Napoleon’s Retreat look orderly and disciplined.
If people thought Iraq and Afghanistan were meat grinders that just chewed up American youth, they shall nave no standard of comparison.
Play to lose. Yeah, THAT’S the ticket.
England in 1940 was not more beleaguered. But then, England had the grand leadership of Winston Churchill.
And who do we have? Even Neville Chamberlain was not so bewildered and astonished by the turn of events, as the Current Occupant must surely be.
Unfortunately, the form of government here in the US does not allow for a “vote of no confidence”, as it could be done in Great Britain.
How convenient......just about ten days ago, Obama released five top terrorist “generals” back into what is now becoming an erupting Middle East. Not a coincidence .
Which side does mcain and grahmnesty want to help this time.......
“The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” Obama told Remnick.
That is pretty funny. It could easily read
“The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a community organizer team puts on commander in chief uniforms that doesn’t make them FDR and/or Ronald Reagan ”
The people that voted for the treasonous Obama should be wanting to kill themselves. Maybe they won’t have to.
The enemy will now do that for them.
Ivy League idiots. I predicted this exact scenario here on FR 6, 5 and 4 years ago and I went to a state college and got an engineering degree.
.... Good thing our Southern Border is now literally wide open for anybody to enter into the US.
Well the Dear Leader had a graduation and fund raiser to do in Mass yesterday so he’s probably sleeping in this morning.
“Iraqi Drama Catches U.S. Off Guard (Senior U.S. Off.: Makes you want to kill yourself)”
When the NSA, CIA and whatever other alphabet intel agencies focus collecting intel on Americans and our allies, we get “surprises” like this all the time in the middle east, the Ukraine, Africa and places we don’t even know about.
WTI Crude 105.82
Yeah. He heard of it some years ago when he created it with Morsi
.... PLEASE Let the professional leaders handle the National Security and important International concerns. It's been 3 am in the morning for the past 5 years and nobody has answered the phone in an intelligent manner. Trust us .... the phone that is ringing is not because of a prank call.
“Ivy League idiots. I predicted this exact scenario here on FR 6, 5 and 4 years ago and I went to a state college and got an engineering degree.”
Hey! That’s not fair, you got a degree in reality and real world uses versus a good old boy pat on the back degree in bs.
If only.
And the Obama Administration is the Pee Wee League.
The greatest intelligence failure since 9/11; the greatest foreign policy failure since the fall of Saigon.
It’s Barry’s world, we just get to live in it.
All brought to you by the perfidy of the domestic left.
In hindsight, it was better to leave Saddam in charge.”
Correction:
I said the first day we rolled into Iraq, that we had to be there for at least 70 years, or else it would quickly crumble.
In hindsight, it was better to leave Saddam in charge.
To get Democracy to flourish in that place we would have had to outright run it for 20 years, and allowed another 50 years for at least two generations to be born under Democracy before it would have had a chance. And nobody wanted to do that - hence not much of a reason to go there in the first place. Neutering Saddam made more sense, and we were pretty close to that at the time of the invasion.
I believe the administration had some naive idea that if we got rid of Saddam, the UN and the rest of the world would finish the job. Unfortunately finishing the job still involved hard work, so expecting the UN to do it was crazy.
Bush launched a War on Terror. Obama launched an appeasement campaign. How’s that working out?
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