Jihadists Seize Iraq's Nineveh Province!

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No surprise at all. It was easily predictable when Obama announced that we were leaving Iraq.

It is now one of the battlegrounds between jihadi Sunni “Caliphatists” and Iranian imperialists for control of the Middle East. Neither the Sunni nor the Shia in Iraq itself wanted to be dominated by either force.

But Obama had dubbed Iraq “Bush’s War” and, even though virtually all parties wanted us to stay to keep peace, he cut and ran.

It didn’t have to be.
 
Ridgerunner said:
No surprise at all. It was easily predictable when Obama announced that we were leaving Iraq.
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Bush should have left Iraq as soon as Hussein was executed and the search for WMDs was exhausted. At that time American casualties were low, and the mission actually had been accomplished. I think we overstayed. But that’s my opinion.
It is now one of the battlegrounds between jihadi Sunni “Caliphatists” and Iranian imperialists for control of the Middle East. Neither the Sunni nor the Shia in Iraq itself wanted to be dominated by either force.
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That’s too bad. Maybe some other super power would like to take this one. We’ve done our share.
But Obama had dubbed Iraq “Bush’s War”
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I wonder who’s war Afghanistan is?
and, even though virtually all parties wanted us to stay to keep peace, he cut and ran.
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It didn’t have to be.
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All parties wanted us to stay? Who was that? Iraqis? Americans? I can’t think of any Americans that I know that wanted us to stay longer…

When would a good time to withdraw have been? What goal needed to be reached? There are factions in the Middle East that will NEVER make peace with each other until either God wills that they make peace; or one side defeats the other on the battlefield.
 
rfournier103 said:
Bush should have left Iraq as soon as Hussein was executed and the search for WMDs was exhausted. At that time American casualties were low, and the mission actually had been accomplished. I think we overstayed. But that’s my opinion.

That’s too bad. Maybe some other super power would like to take this one. We’ve done our share.

I wonder who’s war Afghanistan is?

All parties wanted us to stay? Who was that? Iraqis? Americans? I can’t think of any Americans that I know that wanted us to stay longer…

When would a good time to withdraw have been? What goal needed to be reached? There are factions in the Middle East that will NEVER make peace with each other until either God wills that they make peace; or one side defeats the other on the battlefield.
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I don’t think it’s as simple as this. When will it be time to withdraw from Germany? There is no exact answer to a question like that, because the conditions can change. With Russia on the move again, can we truly say we should have withdrawn ten years ago?

The Sunni tribal leaders and the Kurds made it abundantly clear that they wanted us to stay. Why? First of all because we had the jihadis quelled. We had won the sunni leaders over when the jihadis showed their true colors. The Kurds were unreservedly for America staying to keep the peace. Even the major Shiite leader, Sistani, tacitly supported the peacekeeping. Why? Because he knew Iran’s agent, Al Sadr, as well as the Sunni jihadis would return if we left.

You are quite correct in saying causalties were low when we left. That’s because we actually had won. We threw it away for political reasons. That place will never have peace now until one of the factions wins decisively, and it’s possible neither will.

Bush made a mistake trying to “nation build” in Afghanistan. Should have gone in, blown a lot of things up, killed as many jihadis as we could, and left, promising worse if America was attacked from there again (and meaning it). Obama compounded the error by staying there longer than we should have, throwing money and lives at a war he knew very well we could never win, and handing this country a palpable defeat. It was obvious all along that it couldn’t be won and the place could never be pacified. But he dubbed it the “good war”, in effect, and was committed to it because of that.

Bush was half right and half wrong. Obama was entirely wrong.
 
By midday on Tuesday, militants believed to belong to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, one of the strongest extremist groups, were in control of much of central and southern Mosul, according to witnesses. Local officials claimed that many of the fighters were jihadists who had swept in from the porous border with Syria, who have increasingly operated with impunity in that region even as President Bashar al-Assad has reclaimed ground lost to the insurgents elsewhere in Syria.
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The Mosul assault came in a week when Mr. Maliki’s government has been trying to beat back a surging militant offensive concentrated in central and northern Iraq and carried out by hundreds of well-armed fighters roaming the country in pickup trucks, seemingly able to strike at will.
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“The Iraqi-Syrian border has been steadily disappearing over the last few months with ISIS gains,” Andrew J. Tabler, a senior fellow with the Program on Arab Politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said in an email message. “This episode is probably the biggest example to date of the failure to keep up with and contain the Syria crisis.”
nytimes.com/2014/06/11/world/middleeast/militants-in-mosul.html?_r=0

Mosul, even when it was under government control, was still an important hub for supporting terrorism. Now that it out of government control, Baghdad will have trouble getting it back.
 
Unfortunately Iraq is unstable always has been b/c of the region and the extremists that stay there. We can say oh we should stayed, and if Obama had stayed people would say let’s leave. The USA can’t just station themselves in every unstable country, at a certain point the country must take care of itself.
 
chero23 said:
Unfortunately Iraq is unstable always has been b/c of the region and the extremists that stay there. We can say oh we should stayed, and if Obama had stayed people would say let’s leave. The USA can’t just station themselves in every unstable country, at a certain point the country must take care of itself.
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The U.S. should definitely not stay in every country. But there are some places in the world where it’s in the national interest to do it. Iraq was pacified, and the American forces had a lot of support there among the populace. Now it’s a battleground between largely foreign jihadis and Iranian agents and infiltrators. Nobody but the radicals of either side wants that, but the government isn’t strong enough to defeat either force. And Iran now has free passage to support Assad in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Sunni jihadis have the support of our former allies whom we disappointed by pulling out of Iraq.

We had allies among the people and had both aggressors blocked, but left. Now, Iraq will probably be a battleground for decades until either Iran controls the Middle East to the Mediterranean or the Sunni jihadis beat Iran back and turn the Middle East into an Islamist “caliphate”.

We, and the people of Iraq, held the crucial center, but we let it go to some of the worst people on earth.
 
I wonder what the thoughts of our soldiers that fought so hard to capture those cities only to see them fall into the hands of the enemy.

So can we expect the same to happen in afghanistan when Obama pulls the troops out.

I wonder what would have happened to south korea if we hadn’t left our military there as a presence to help south korea.
 
7_Sorrows said:
I wonder what the thoughts of our soldiers that fought so hard to capture those cities only to see them fall into the hands of the enemy.

So can we expect the same to happen in afghanistan when Obama pulls the troops out.

I wonder what would have happened to south korea if we hadn’t left our military there as a presence to help south korea.
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It would have been bad for South Korea if the U.S. had left.
 
Ridgerunner said:
Iraq was pacified, and the American forces had a lot of support there among the populace…
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Thats a bit of an exaggeration, don’t you think? If anything, I think this incident is proof enough that we shouldn’t be there. We don’t have the support of the Iraqis and never did; at least not in any way that matters. Media reports cite their government forces putting down their weapons, abandoning their positions, and begging locals for civilian clothes as they walked away from the fight en masse. 8 years we were there and if thats the best they can do for themselves then its a lost cause.
 
EmperorNapoleon said:
Thats a bit of an exaggeration, don’t you think? If anything, I think this incident is proof enough that we shouldn’t be there. We don’t have the support of the Iraqis and never did; at least not in any way that matters. Media reports cite their government forces putting down their weapons, abandoning their positions, and begging locals for civilian clothes as they walked away from the fight en masse. 8 years we were there and if thats the best they can do for themselves then its a lost cause.
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I do not think it’s an exaggeration at all. All three major groups in Iraq asked us to stay.

Many, possibly even most, of the jihadis in Iraq and Syria are foreigners to those countries. The jihadi cause draws the murderous and crazy from all over the Islamic world. They know the world value of Iraq even if this administration doesn’t. Iranian-aligned groups and Iranian regulars are there too. How would law enforcement be in, say, St. Louis if every gang member in the U.S. suddenly moved there and decided to prey on the populace. Local efforts at law enforcement would fail utterly and immediately. I don’t think people would then say “Well, St. Louisans had it coming since they couldn’t even defend their own city.” People would say the very best in law enforcement help from all over the country should be dispatched to St. Louis. And it would take a lot longer than 8 years to clean the place up and establish lasting order.

Iraq occupies a central position and role in the Middle East. It actually had an infrastructure and a relatively well-educated populace. Obama had to know it would become a battleground between Iran and Sunni jihadis if we left. But he made it a campaign issue and didn’t care what happened to Iraqis or to the rest of the world. He wanted to “make himself right” short-term, regardless of the long term consequences to Iraqis, Americans, and the world. The price will be paid over a very, very long period of time, and the “Arab Caliphate/Persian War” might never actually end.
 
7 Sorrows
I wonder what the thoughts of our soldiers that fought so hard to capture those cities only to see them fall into the hands of the enemy.
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They now know that their brother’s who died there, died in vain.

What is happening in Iraq was predicted by middle east experts and those who opposed the war, before Bush invaded.

He and his staff ignored the cultures of the Middle East and Vice President Cheney himself said on Meet the Press, that it wasn’t important to know about the culture of a country we go to war against. We’ve paid in life and treasure for that ignorance.
So can we expect the same to happen in afghanistan when Obama pulls the troops out.
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Absolutely.

The Taliban have been fighting to take back control of the country and will do so, as soon as we leave. They have been getting full support of the Pakistani Government.

Again, this was another George Bush blunder, ignoring the intelligence we had on Afghanistan going back to the Soviet War.

Also, the Administration ignored the hatred most of the country has towards Hamid Karzai, who went to live in India during the war with the Soviets, only to return as a puppet government of the United States. Karzai immediately invited India to set up the first foreign embassy in Afghanistan. Of course the Pakistani’s are long time enemies of India and hates having an Indian Embassy in Afghanistan. It’s the motive for them helping the Taliban to take down the Karzai Government.

As soon as we leave, so will Karzai and his friends, who have most probably been putting US aid money into their private Swiss bank accounts. If he tries to stay in Afghanistan, he’ll be murdered and he knows it, so, when we leave, so will Karzai. Another war US soldiers died in vain for, except that we did get Bin Laden, but what a heavy price to pay.

We should never have gotten sucked into wars on the Middle East, as Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary, after he pulled the Marines out of Lebanon.
I wonder what would have happened to south korea if we hadn’t left our military there as a presence to help south korea.
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Entirely different situation. This was a war of governments with different ideologies, i.e. one communist, the other democratic.

In the Middle East, it’s a war of religion against the infidels.

Muslims are being asked by the US not only to support our ideas of democracy, but also to commit apostasy by supporting the infidels who killed their people.

The Bush administration got the US into a bad situation with their wars in the Middle East, and we will be paying in treasure and lives for generations to come.

Jim
 
If you had been president what would you have done after the attacks of 9/11 on our country?
 
JimR-OCDS said:
7 Sorrows

What is happening in Iraq was predicted by middle east experts and those who opposed the war, before Bush invaded.

He and his staff ignored the cultures of the Middle East and Vice President Cheney himself said on Meet the Press, that it wasn’t important to know about the culture of a country we go to war against. We’ve paid in life and treasure for that ignorance.
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Yes, I remember the liberal “experts” who predicted the wholesale slaughter of American troops. I also remember that the first phase of the Gulf war never ended, despite the truce. It was one war in two phases.

And the Democrats in Congress voted in favor of it. So I guess they’re not the “experts” who opposed it.

Parenthetically, I am willing to give most Iraqis the benefit of the doubt that they actually want to proceed with their lives without jihadism.
 
7_Sorrows said:
If you had been president what would you have done after the attacks of 9/11 on our country?
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Defuse the importance of Al Qaeda by reporting that it was the act of criminals and not broadcast the credit to Al Qaeda, which only served to help them celebrate, but also to recruit and put them on heighten alert that we were coming, which is what Bin Laden wanted.

I would then work covertly to get Bin Laden and the other leaders of Al Qaeda.

Instead, Bush declared war on Al Qaeda, which sent Bin Laden and his henchmen into flight mode. . He then outsourced the initial ground war to the Northern Alliance, and failed to secure the border into Pakistan. By the time we started using ground troops and bombing Tora Bora, the enemy was long gone. We took the control away from the Taliban, but also gave it to a despised Afghan, Hamid Karzai.

In all, he ignored the intel we had from the war with the Soviets, which would’ve told us who Karzai put in charge of defense, an Afghan who actually fought on the side of the Soviets and had a reputation of having driving Soviet Tanks over prisoners who were hog-tied.

BTW, all this can be read in the book, “Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror,” by Michael Scheuer.

It’s all too late now. We’ve managed to get ourselves into wars in the Middle East, and kill more innocent. people than those responsible for 9/11. The families of those innocent people who were killed, will seek revenge for generations to come. In other words, we help fan the flames of hatred.

We also lost American lives and the cost for the wars has sent the national debt to the level we see today.

Lastly, I also fault Barack Obama for not getting out of Afghanistan as he promised. His presidency will be in it’s last year by the time all of our troops have left.

In the end, the Taliban will get back what they had, and more. They’ll have the credit in the Islamic world, that they defeated the USA.

Jim
 
Ridgerunner
Yes, I remember the liberal “experts” who predicted the wholesale slaughter of American troops.
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I don’t remember anyone thinking US troops would be slaughtered. Those who thought this, were wrong.
I also remember that the first phase of the Gulf war never ended, despite the truce. It was one war in two phases.
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The only phase of the Gulf War was to drive Saddam out of Kuwait. Fact is, it was a war for the oil companies who had contracts with Kuwait, but were now null because of Saddam.

It was an Arab problem which required an Arab solution. Getting sucked into the ME was the beginning of our problem, which will go on for generations.
And the Democrats in Congress voted in favor of it. So I guess they’re not the “experts” who opposed it.
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Everyone who voted in favor of allowing Bush the use of military power to go into Iraq, were wrong. There were a few who voted against it, Ted Kennedy and Ron Paul being two. They were right. Those who voted for it, like Hilary Clinton, did so for political expediency at the time, because there was popular support to take down Saddam. When no WMD’s were found and things started going badly, those like Hillary tried to back pedal and claim that they never knew Bush was planing to invade Iraq when the voted for the resolution. She lied and from what I understand, wrote the lie in her recently released book.
Parenthetically, I am willing to give most Iraqis the benefit of the doubt that they actually want to proceed with their lives without jihadism.
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Iraq is a divided nation between Shiites, Sunni and Kurds. They will be at each others throats as they were in the past, and Al Qaeda will make use of it, as they’re doing in Syria.

As ruthless as Saddam was, he was right when he said that if we take him down, it will take five others like him to control the country and keep it from going into civil war.

Jim
 
By leaving when the heavy lifiting was over, Obama snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

The ME will be reaping the poisoned fruits of that blunder for some time to come.

For the rest of the world, the best that can be hoped for is that the Sunnis and the Shias engage in this battle against each other for quite some time to come. That at least spells somewhat of a reprieve for those on the outside.
 
I notice they are better armed now too. And they are one city away from being even better armed. Sad really.

How much did we pay to arm and train these people? The Bin Laden conflict is what that was.
 
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