Posted on 06/23/2014 4:17:56 PM PDT by SkyPilot
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday promised "intense and sustained" U.S. support for Iraq, but said the divided country would only survive if its leaders took urgent steps to bring it together.
Hours before Kerry arrived in Baghdad, Sunni tribes who have joined a militant takeover of northern Iraq seized the only legal crossing point with Jordan, security sources said, leaving troops with no presence along the entire western frontier which includes some of the Middle East's most important trade routes.
U.S. President Barack Obama has offered up to 300 American advisers to Iraq but held off granting Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shi'ite Muslim-led government's request for air strikes to counter the two-week advance by Sunni militants.
Officials have meanwhile called for Iraqis to form an inclusive government. The insurgency has been fuelled largely by a sense of marginalisation and persecution among Iraq's Sunnis.
"The support will be intense and sustained and if Iraq's leaders take the necessary steps to bring the country together, it will be effective," Kerry told reporters in Baghdad.
He said Maliki had "on multiple occasions affirmed his commitment to July 1" as the date to start the formation of a new government bringing in more Sunnis and Kurds to share power, a move Washington is keen to see.
Iraqi and Jordanian security sources said tribal leaders were negotiating to hand the Turabil desert border post to Sunni Islamists from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) who took two main crossings with Syria in recent days and have pushed the Shi'ite-led government's forces back toward Baghdad.
Iraq state television said late on Monday that the army had recaptured both the crossing with Jordan and the al-Waleed crossing with Syria. Reuters could not independently confirm reports due to security restrictions.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I said months ago Assad was the best of all the bad choices in Syria.
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 America demands Justice for the Fallen of Benghazi! |
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If Kerry ever catches Obama off the golf course he should remind Obama that at the leader of the anti war movement in Vietnam, Kerry came home to defame his country and throw his fellow soldiers under the bus with blanket accusations of “atrocities”. Kerry has no credibility and no business being in Iraq now. “It’s the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Sept 6, 2004 John Kerry referring to war in Iraq, that he voted for in 2002.
No American sons should go to war under these circumstances.
Is this like the intense and sustained support we promised the Ukraine?
A promise from Kerry is worthless. Less than worthless.
I remember a book set in the future, with a space station / habitat looking to use quantum string theory to essentially relocate to distant parts of the universe.
It has a polyamory family, political conservatives trying to prevent them from being allowed to have children in space, vaguely Heinlein-like.
What caused the greatest suspension of disbelief to me at the time was the “Middle East Sweep”. The author had imagined that Muslim extremists had risen up against modernity, and through massive campaigns of terror, reverted back to Shariah law. One of the main female characters was raised by a mother/grandmother who escaped that nightmare and lived in Canada.
Fascinating that the “return to oppressive Caliphate” is now the most likely element of the book”.
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