Iraq wants US assistance now
The Associated Press reports that Iraq is asking the US for aid to help them tamp down on violence that has wracked the country with 1000 deaths in July, the highest number of casualties since 2008;
The violence has spurred Baghdad to seek new U.S. aid to curb the threat, said Iraqi Foreign Minister Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari. He said a U.S. assistance package could include a limited number of advisers, intelligence analysis and surveillance assets – including lethal drones.
“There is greater realization in the Iraq government that we should not shy away from coming and asking for some help and assistance,” Zebari told reporters Friday in Washington.
Yeah, well, the Iraqis forced us out of their country because they couldn’t come up with a reasonable Status of Forces Agreement to protect our soldiers and Marines from the Iraqi courts. I don’t see them coming up with one now either.
Zebari attributed the insurgency’s comeback to its partnerships with al-Qaida fighters in neighboring Syria and outlawed Baath Party extremists in Iraq’s south. Intelligence experts have described the terror group’s footing in Iraq and Syria as a new al-Qaida hub in the Mideast, one that has sought for years to underscore Baghdad’s inability to protect its people.
Yeah, well, tough. They had their chance and eight years with which to fix their country under our protective umbrella and they squandered their chance. We have our own problems at home.
Category: Terror War
we might as well seize their oil, we’ve been accused of doing that since the start of the war anyway.
TN, you have nearly the exact same assessment of the whole situation as I do … and you actually expanded my understanding with your comparisons to Eastern Europe just after the Cold War ended.
Let me add that Islam is the problem, to the degree that it has not had its own Reformation … the shift from total submission to a clerical hierarchy of temporal gatekeepers to Heaven, to a direct relationship between a man/woman and his/her God. Once that shift is made, the way is clear for a move to the true vaccine against tyranny – rights-respecting governance – because that man/woman has no obligation to respect a tyrant for the sake of their soul.
Those majorities you speak of have, at least in their own lives, made that shift. Those with power, have not … in part because it is the hierarchy that gives them that power.
IMO, the ingredient we lack is the same one that let this problem get out of hand … a lack of confidence, on the part of the leaders of free nations, in the principles that have made them free … a vacuum that has been filled instead with moral equivalence, stemming from guilt for their colonialist pasts, that treats dictator and democrat with equal sovereign respect.
The lack of resolve, in word and deed, on the part of free people, to confront tyranny and work to replace it – by force, when prudent – with rights-respecting governance is precisely what has kept these nations in such dysfunction … and has created the very “war without end” many opponents of such resolve publicly decry, thinking that if we just refuse to fight, that the war will end.
They do not understand that it is the loser that decides WHEN the war ends … it is the prerogative of the victor, to decide HOW the war ends.
Just remember who was in charge of working out the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqis: Joe Biden. It didn’t get worked out because the Obama administration never intended to come to any agreement that would impede the president’s ability to claim that he “ended” the war. There was almost no communication between Washington and Baghdad during the months they had to work it out. It’s just one more example of certain American politicians’ and pundits’ inability or unwillingness to grasp that there are certain postures Iraqi and Afghani leaders must delicately maintain before their own people just to survive, and that negotiations of this sort have to take place carefully and quietly. Of course the leadership (such as it is) of these marginal states is not exactly prime cut, but it is in the interest of the U.S. and the civilized world to massage them along, if at all possible, and to keep them from becoming terrorist havens and economic basket cases. But you gotta wanna — and Obama didn’t, never will, doesn’t care, and is just too plain dim to get it.
TN–this nation hasn’t been committed to winning a conflict since WWII. Iraq and Afghanistan were no different.
@53 Winefred :
Well said.
Thanks Ritchie.
You’re correct Sparky. I did leave out the “Forgotten War.” Though I would also point out the successes in Central America, Grenada, and the Dominican Republic.
Jesus, folks.
Arm the Kurds.
Take a percentage of the oil cut (20%).
Get ready for “Kurdistan”.
Back it.
Problem solved. (Sorta, but a good start)