Iraq…again

So here we are talking about a war in Iraq again – the third time in 23 years. We always seem to end our involvement too soon to satisfy history. According to the New York Times, ISIS claims that they’ve murdered hundreds, if not thousands of Shi’ite Iraqis. Terrorists can’t stop terrorizing.

Even as anecdotal reports of extrajudicial killings around the country seemed to bear out the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’s intent to kill Shiites wherever it could, Iraqi officials and some human rights groups cautioned that the militants’ claim to have killed 1,700 soldiers in Tikrit could not be immediately verified.

Meanwhile, the US is scheduled for talks with Iran over their nuclear program, but other issues will seep into the discussions, says the Wall Street Journal;

The U.S. and Iran have publicly committed in recent days to provide military support if requested to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and help his government repel an offensive the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, has launched against Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities over the past week.

With terrorists at the gates of Baghdad, with suicide bombers killing more Iraqis in that city, The Marine Corps Times reports that about 100 soldiers and Marines are on their way to The Green Zone to bolster security at our largest embassy;

“Overall, a substantial majority of the U.S. Embassy presence in Iraq will remain in place and the embassy will be fully equipped to carry out its national security mission,” she said.

Some embassy staff members have been temporarily moved elsewhere to more stable places at consulates in Basra in the Shiite-dominated south of Iraq and Irbil in the Kurdish semi-autonomous region in northeastern Iraq and to Jordan, she said.

Slate has finally come to the conclusion that withdrawing from Iraq was probably a mistake;

Once Americans collectively settled on the idea that the Iraq War was a disaster, it was perhaps inevitable that we’d want to wash our hands of the whole ordeal. President Obama appeared to do just that when he declared in December of 2011 that “we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq,” knowing full well that we were doing no such thing. The disaster that is the Iraq War did not end when the last convoy of U.S. combat troops left the country more than three years ago, as many of us are now learning as the fragile Iraqi state loses ground to Sunni extremists.

Of course, the President has been hard at work on a solution to the problem in Iraq, you know, while he and the family spent the weekend at Palm Springs.

Obama said as he left for the trip Friday that he told his national security team to come up with options for U.S. assistance to deal with the worst instability in Iraq since the U.S. withdrawal in 2011.

I guess he was hoping the problem would correct itself while he was on the back nine.Like I said last week, a real national security team and a real President would have had a plan in place after Fallujah fell to ISIS earlier in the Spring, but not this crowd. They can’t see past the end of their collective nose apparently.

Fox broadcast News is hinting that John Kerry has threatened drone strikes in the near future. I’m guessing that there were reports of the ISIS forces urinating on the corpses of dead Shi’ites and that just won’t stand.

Category: Terror War