While I agree with the authors premise. With OBOZO in charge this will never happen. His side is winning and his side is not AMERICA’S side
Freegards
LEX
Easy. Replace the American Government with one not interested in building the Caliphate.
“Use strategic air power. Send ground combat forces.”
Duh. Of course our cuurent CIC has to be told this.
Obama couldn’t care less. Iraq in chaos just further vilifies Bush, as the Left blames everything on him.
In some way, they’d probably enjoy seeing Baghdad fall.
With a communist traitor in the Red House, who wishes for a crippled America, why would you think he would do anything, esp. now?
He is ISIS’s best friend in DC.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Purple trigger fingers BUMP!
Isn’t having airplanes fly around without giving them permission to hit any targets enough? That should show those mean ISIS folks we mean business!
Bammy would need to renounce Islam. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.
The clear strategic objective is, as it was in 2003, to prevent the control of national assets to fall into the hands of violent militants who will use them against Americans. As before, those national assets may or may not include chemical and nuclear weapons at the moment, but in time they will. I stated then that the best we might expect out of Bush's intervention was to buy us time, rather more time, I hoped, than we actually got courtesy of his successor's malign and incompetent meddling. But the strategic situation has changed since then. A threat to the Saudi wells is no longer an existential threat to the world economy; it's a dangerous one, to be sure, but not what we faced in '03 and definitely not what we faced in '91. That changes what ISIS can and cannot do despite all the chest-pounding about smuggling nukes into New York. That's fluff for the cameras; they're not ready for that yet because they're not ready to follow it up. In time they may be.
On the other side of this coin, if we take ground we're going to have to hold it, because the Iraqis don't seem to want to. Nor, actually, does any sober American strategist. What Bush found out was that yes, you can build a nation if you're prepared to prop it up indefinitely. If not, not.
In the north we have the Kurds who have proven that they can both take and hold territory, but at whom the Turks look at askance because they claim what the Turks call their own. That is a diplomatic challenge, not a military one. In the east, the Iranians who are having the usual ethnic and sectarian problems moving west. Nuclear weapons won't help that. In the south, the Saudis will be nuclear themselves very soon if they aren't already. In the far west, we have incessant warfare from the Golan Heights to Yemen.
What we do not have is either the means or the determination to straighten this mess out, if that is even possible. Five millennia of recorded history suggest that it might not be. My humble suggestion is for us to do what we have the means to succeed at: strengthen the periphery in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey should that country decide it prefers to be part of the solution instead of, as at present, part of the problem. I wouldn't bet on the latter. As for the rest, I don't think you can really stop people from fighting who want to.
I’m conflicted.
On the one hand, the insane people busily killing each other off “over there” is a plus in lowering the threat of insane people traveling from there, and killing us over here.
OTOH, I’m not at all happy about all the killings.
Since it really doesn’t appear possible to stop the insane people from killing each other, it might be best to just let them have at it, and not interfere, except to keep them far away from the rest of humanity.
If people think we, as in the USA, must get involved, we could aid the Kurds, kick out..er persuade the EU nations and the UN to not interfere, toss Turkey out of NATO, and let China/Russia/India send in ground forces to “help”.
Bagdad has fallen many, many times. It’s been sacked and re-sacked over and over.
But I guess more of our people have to die over there for us to save face. I hope all our military personnel read this article and see what they are being asked to die for.
Baghdad is not going to fall. The Shia militias will fight tooth and nail and Iran will help them. The are willing to give up places like Ramadi, which are Sunni, but Baghdad is theirs.
I do not think that Baghdad is in any danger of falling to ISIS. Baghdad is a city with a couple million Shiites. ISIS would not be stupid enough to try to tackle it, they do not have the manpower. They would need an army of at least 100,000 fighters to take the city.
1. Get rid of Obama. He created ISIS and now he wants it to take over Iraq.
Obama is funding and arming ISIS. Why would he ever bomb them?
Ya think those in Iraq give a sh**t about our lawless violent borders, declining middle class/economy, fraudulent electoral process, millions out of work, or our corrupt govenrment run by well connected insiders? Ask them if they have any idea the U.S. Government has spent itself into a 19 trillion dollar hole.
We should also build up new states in the area that will be anti-Islamic state -- a new Iraq consisting of the Shia portions, a Kurdistan, a new Assyria, an Alevi-Christian confederation in western Syria. The Sunni heartland between the two can be owned by the Islamic state and cut-off by fencing + ditches and we use the special ops and airpower to pick them off slowly while at the same time people will rebel because they won't be able to create a functioning state
So a western Christian-Alevi-Druze state
an eastern Shia state, a north-eastern Kurdistan and a land-locked Assyria safeguarded by NATO