Finally.......the President is going to cut some Airpower loose to help the Christians who are starving in Iraq because the nice peace loving Muslims are trying affect a Christian genocide. We will see how well this works.
Slap:
Hopefully that airdrop was actually needed and not just a pr stunt. Tom Odom wrote of a pr airdrop that he was forced to be part of in Congo (then Zaire). The limited number of airplanes involved make me think it was more a pr thing.
I am not sure about airstrikes unless we have good targeting which may be difficult to do. If it can't be done, with certainty, I would rather see the Kurds get truckloads of ammo and boxes full of money.
"We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." Gen. Nathanael Greene
When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles. - Louis Veuillot
That is right. It is time we face the reality that we are fighting a Religious War and there is know Strategy. But there can and should be justice. The Islamic barbarians are killing Christian women and children in the most horrific ways! They have destroyed church upon church some that date back to the 8th century and beyond and they burned holy Christian documents that can never be replaced.
So it is time to face the fact that we are not fighting a religion of peace we are fighting a Satanic cult and traditional laws and rules used by normal human beings will not work against the ***** animals we are facing.... everything they value should be wiped off the face of the earth.
And Saudi Arabia should be made to pay for it all since they are the ones that started this crap to start with.
listen to Sergeant Johnson he understands!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu4ca3h-JQY
Last edited by davidbfpo; 08-09-2014 at 11:00 AM. Reason: Author aware of SWC RoE and language hence editing
The U.S. is not fighting a religious war and neither are most Muslims. Several militant organizations that identity as Muslim claim to be fighting a religious war, but that does not mean the U.S., in response, should combat the one billion Muslims living today.
Genocide much?So it is time to face the fact that we are not fighting a religion of peace we are fighting a Satanic cult and traditional laws and rules used by normal human beings will not work against the ***** animals we are facing.... everything they value should be wiped off the face of the earth.
That's true to an extent. Unfortunately for the Saudis (and their neighbors and the U.S.), the royal family is always balancing its material security with its religious legitimacy. That's the consequence of making an alliance with the religious establishment many decades ago. It wasn't until 1979 with the seizure of the Grand Mosque, the Iranian Revolution, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that militant Islam took root. And that's not because the Saudis are hell-bent on conquering the world, but for the sake of the kingdom's political survival. The solution is not to enrage the whole Muslim faith by destroying their religious sites but to reform the Saudi state.And Saudi Arabia should be made to pay for it all since they are the ones that started this crap to start with.
Last edited by AmericanPride; 08-09-2014 at 05:00 PM.
When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles. - Louis Veuillot
Yes, the US currently is very confused about what is going on in the world right now.
Screwed up Libya, dithered on Syria until it boiled over, presided over a bad ending in Iraq, impotent with respct to Ukraine and Gaza and we await the anticipated collapse in Afghanistan.
I put it to you that the US does not know what the hell is going on in the world around it.
Posted by JMA
As for Syria leading to the situation in Iraq, it certainly didn't help it (nor could we have changed that dynamic), but it would have happened anyway. Read about AQ's strategy in Iraq, they were making significant progress independent of anything happening in Syria. See the link I provided above on the Rise of the ISI. It actually provides great insight into their campaign plan, and what we can anticipate in the future.It was the West's failure to act in Syria - led by current US Administration - which set the scene for the current state of affairs in Iraq where it is all happening.
Key excerpts:
This nests perfectly with AQ's Management of Savagery strategy that is available via a Google search.That campaign was absolutely crucial in allowing the Islamic State to start its second 12-month campaign, which was “Soldier’s Harvest.” That has essentially seen the Islamic State launch a really concerted, high-level and brutal campaign of multiple bombings, large and small, and a concerted campaign of assassinations. Essentially, it sought to spark the perceptions of sectarian conflict within Iraqi dynamics and to transfer what were existing sectarian tensions within the political system, for example, back into the tribal thinking, back into societal thinking. That, in effect, created a vacuum which the Islamic State felt it would be able to step into, and in many respects that is what it has managed to do just in the last couple of months.
Interesting commentThe bombings not only influenced that element of sectarian conflict in Iraq, but additionally, it also enforced a serious level of intimidation on the security forces – to the extent to which it was possible on a very local level for Islamic State commanders to essentially force the local army commanders to surrender without a fight. And certainly from what it’s been possible to see from Mosul in early June, that seems to have been what happened when the city fell. A lot of that was the result of this expansive intelligence and intimidation campaign, in addition to military attacks which had been taking place across Sunni areas of Iraq for at least the last two or three years.
Goes on to say thatThere will come a point at which the Islamic State will feel that if it continues the kind of gains that it’s making at the moment, it will reach a point at which it feels like it doesn’t anymore need these relationships with some of these groups. It will be at that point – where [the Islamic State] begins to assert itself more unilaterally – that you could start to see these relationships crumble.
Indicates they have a plan and can adapt to changes on the ground. I be the lone voice in this discussion, but I think the President is right that regarding military operations only having a minimal effect until the Iraqi government cleans up its act. Once there is a government worth fighting for, it will be easier (not easy) to clean ISI out of the key areas, especially if they continue to fight as a semi-conventional force. We can do that now, but to what end if we can't consolidate the victory with viable political control to hold the ground?Having said that, the Islamic State has proven its ability to pragmatically withdraw from territory where it feels like it can’t win – and then to later go back and recapture it. That’s what it’s doing in Syria at the moment.
I appreciate just how humiliating it is for Americans right now but when the signs were that it was all going pear-shaped the 'flock' blindly supported a failing policy and attacked anyone who strayed 'off-message'.
Certainly in time we will have more clarity on this and other matters. In the meantime the best advice is to resist any knee-jerk defence of obvious failure.
The US did screw up in Iraq and Afghanistan, but at the beginning, not at the end. The screwup lay in the arrogance and hubris implicit in the belief that American intervention could solve the problems in those countries, and that it would be possible to "install democracy" and make it work.
The US does seem to have learned a bit from those mistakes, and they appear to be a bit more restrained about trying to solve other people's problems.
Criticisms of policy in places like Syria, Libya, and Gaza would be more credible if accompanied by some suggestion of what might have been a better policy... ideally a serious suggestion, not a facetious claim that three cruise missiles would have solved the problem, or something similar.
Knowing what is going on is one issue, having a viable plan for doing something about it is another.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”
H.L. Mencken
Complicity sounds so... conspiratorial. I don't think the military is complicit in anything beyond trying to do what they were told to do. Sometimes badly, arguably, but anyone who hands an army a mission like "nation building" has to expect that things won't all go well.
I don't think Bush is "guilty" of anything beyond hubris, and if that's a crime there's a lot of criminals out there. Catastrophic results, of course, but that's often the case. I don't think Obama is guilty of anything beyond doing what he was elected to do... the eternal inconvenience of democracy.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”
H.L. Mencken
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