Mosul, When the Walls Fall….
In the ‘ Telegraphing Mosul’ article, 2/17 Air Cav reports on 11/25/2016 that ISIS is killing thousands of civilians and/or using them as shields against the Heroic Forces (Iraqis/Peshmerga/ whoever).
November 25, 2016 at 10:09 am 2/17 Air Cav says: I agree except there’s the political fallout from killing thousands that one claims to be trying to save. It’s a bit of a sticky wicket. The thing is, there was an inevitable quality to it, so I can only guess that the Heroic Forces banked on ISIS taking off in a convoy of pickup trucks.
Ex-PH2 says: If there is political fallout from the deaths of all those people, it should land on ISIS/Daesh. They are invaders, usurpers and thieves following a death cult. They could have simply asked for space and probably gotten it, but they did not do that.
They are going to go on with this mass slaughter, regardless, and it is not the fault of those outside in the Iraqi/Peshmerga/Other groups. There exists a naive idea, a hallmark of media stupidity, that with a quasi-political group like Daesh, there is anyone at fault other than the group doing the slaughtering.
Like it or not, it is true. The fault lies with Daesh/ISF/ISIS, or whatever they style themselves now. They set up a death cult in 2014, attempting to overthrow local governments, destroy property, swallow up land that did not belong to them, and create havoc by recruiting followers in distant lands through the magic of the internet. They have repeatedly displayed behavior that is not just sociopathic but also psychotic. If it is not psychotic to tell a six-year-old child to hold up the severed head of someone just slaughtered so that his picture can be taken and publicized on the internet, then what is it?
Is there a difference between these people and the Viet Cong? The VC also recruited children to join them. Some of them were boys who were barely 13 years old and had no idea why they were doing what they were told to do. But it was not the death cult built by ISIS/Daesh. Pol Pot’s relationship with the Khmer Rouge was closer to Daesh. ‘Kill anyone who will not join, and anyone over XXX age’.
ISIS/Daesh is nothing more than politics disguised as religion. Where have we seen this before? Lenin, Trotsky and the purges of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 grew into the USSR under Joseph Stalin. Hitler found his way into power with his speeches and controlling the press, among other things, rounding up not just Jews, but anyone deemed defective or who disagreed with him, or was ethnically undesirable. More recently were the Hutus v Tutsis in Rwanda, wholesale slaughter in other parts of Africa, Milosevic’s rampages through Eastern Europe, and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and trampling the Kuwaiti people, which got the US into a local war you may or may not have heard of.
The brutality that these people have perpetrated on the innocent, has shocked and will continue to shock, a population that seems to think it’s not real until they are confronted by it. Sensationalism in the press is, and has been, the order of the day since some newly-minted wet plate photographers like Carol Szathmari, an Austro-Hungarian photographer decided to go onto the battlefield during the Crimean War and record what he saw. He was the first real combat photographer. The mobile darkroom was improved and Matthew Brady and others like him took advantage of its improvements to record the results of battles during the US Civil War. The results were too shocking for publication.
When ideology is used as an excuse to dominate people and slaughter those who refuse to join up or who disagree with the ideology, the fault lies on the shoulders of the Ideologues, not those who try to stop them. Ideologues cannot be bargained with nor can they be trusted to keep their word, or abide by any agreements they sign. Must I bring up Neville Chamberlin’s idiotic agreement with Hitler over the Sudetenland? To people like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, and al-Baghdadi, and never mind which ayatollah is now in charge in Tehran, a bargain with them is seen as a sign of weakness and stupidity. They wait until your back is turned and you’re gone, thinking you’ve solved the problem.
Well, you haven’t. They go right back to what they were doing before you bargained with them. How else do you account for the return of al Qaeda to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and new ransom demands by Tehran? Must I remind anyone here that as soon as the US began to withdraw from Vietnam in 1973, General Giap started planning the takeover of the South, and put Van Tien Dung in charge of invading the South all over again? Would you like to review those films of NVA tanks rolling into Saigon in 1975?
So what are we facing? Is it continued long-term, siege warfare that wears everyone down to nothing, as happened for us with Vietnam and with Afghanistan for the Soviets? As 2/17 Air Cav has said, flattening the city of Mosul would be an effective way to end this dogfight, but there are 1.5 to 2 million people in Mosul who will be killed in the process.
They’re civilians. They are already being slaughtered by ISIS/Daesh, regardless, because that is what those inhuman slugs do. The ISers have no conscience, no sense of what is right or wrong, only that Death is their real God and they will do anything to please Death. No matter what is done by the Heroic Forces, those people are going to die, period.
Does it make sense to flatten the place and poison the soil for the next 2,500 centuries, IF those people are going to be killed, regardless? And will it stop this from happening again?
To put it in more relevant terms, if you know that someone wants to kill you, no matter how nice you are, are you going to just let him slaughter you over nothing? Or will you say, “You want to talk to God? Let’s go see him together. I’ve got nothing better to do.”
Category: Politics
Cripes. My wife wants to know whether I have taken to wearing rouge. I tell her, “No, you just haven’t seen me blush in years.” She asks, “Why are you blushing?” and I say, “Somehow, I just became an authority on Mosul.” She is not impressed and tells me to take out the garbage.
Aww, shucks. Didn’t mean to make you turn pink, Air Cav.
It doesn’t matter how the thugs self-identify, when they threaten to kill you and have the means to kill you it behooves a sane people to never give the thugs the opportunity to kill while they neutralize the threat. We used to call that survival. To do otherwise, either individually or collectively, is suicide.
It also doesn’t matter if the setting is Mosul, Melbourne, or Minneapolis, this century, the last one, or three before that.
No, you’re right. It does not matter one bit how they define themselves. They are no better than the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot – just as evil and just as deadly, and they must be stopped, period.
Actually, ISIS/Daesh is not disguised at all. Islam is a political system as well as a religion. Muhammad was a head of state as well as the head of a religion. There is no separation of church and state in Islam. It is a totalitarian system.
Its pretensions are religious, as is its dogma. This allows them to claim discrimination against them based on their religion.
Even though most of us have the common sense to recognize that it is NOT a religious group at all, there is that group of heads of state who insist that it is nothing else.
I have to disagree with the “not a religion” statement. -They- certainly believe it is a religion, that they are faithfully obedient to it. Their faith in their beliefs drive their behavior. It also makes them fairly predictable, -if- you can wrap your head around their thinking.
To fail to understand that is to utterly fail to seee how to defeat them. You cant just destroy the practitioners of this murderous cult. They just grow more. You have to attack their -faith- in it, to show them that they are -not- going to get some Devine support, that we the Free will not be broken to their lash, no matter what barbarities they unleash.
Sadly, we will have to unleash that oh-so-ugly face of the American warrior, when we lose our shit and go for the throat. Its the bloody Juggernaught that ground the Third Reich and the Empire of Japan into rubble, and named our deadliest helicopter the Apache, after the most savagely barbaric foes we ever fought, and still grudgingly respect.
And we assimilated -that- foe into our blood and tradition.
This is a generational effort,and goes beyond just “islamic State” or whatever the curent kooks call themselves. It is going to get much dirtier, much more savage. And when it does, they will be facing an extinction event.
-Never- doubt they have faith in their beliefs. Otherwise, you blind yourself to just how far they will really go.
From what I’ve seen, including al-Baghdadi’s speech quoted below, it is using religious dogma as an excuse to make war. We are, in fact, one day away from the day (11/27/1095) that Pope Urban II made his speech at the Council of Clermont, in which he said that anyone who engaged in a holy crusade against the Muslim Turks and Arabs,who had attacked and occupied the territory of Romania, who be absolved of any and all sins. This is an excerpt: All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested. O what a disgrace if such a despised and base race, which worships demons, should conquer a people which has the faith of omnipotent God and is made glorious with the name of Christ! With what reproaches will the Lord overwhelm us if you do not aid those who, with us, profess the Christian religion!’ This is the link: http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/urban2-fulcher.html He ended the speech with ‘Deus vult!’ “God wills it!” If you go back into some of the news reports about ISIS/Daesh in the beginning of their campaign, many of them referred to and used the term ‘Crusaders’, which means nothing has changed with them since Middle Ages. 921 years have gone by, and they still haven’t gotten over losing the field. You could say they’re brainwashed because they act that way, but so do the people we refer to as libidiots and libtards, SJWs, etc., whose behavior is essentially the same: a dogma of some kind fills the gap that Western religion/Christianity used to fill. Likewise, they are rather predictable. Even the speech patterns of Lefties show a willingness to destroy anyone who opposes them. Anyone who understands this, like al-Baghdadi and some politicians, can feed into that empty emotional space and acquire a following. The object is, or should be, to get the ISers/Daesh out of Mosul and engage them in real warfare, to the death, if necessary –… Read more »
Chump in Chief at a staff meeting: Work with the Iraqis in planning to retake Mosul and make sure our plans and the schedule are thoroughly publicized in all media outlets.
Questions?: Yes that man in the corner with all of that stuff on his uniform:
Sir: With all due respect, would not an unannounced night raid from the rear before ISIS has time to prepare to minimize military and causalities be more effective?
Chump in Chief: My legacy is more important than a few causalities as long as they are not ours because we don’t have boots on the ground, well not a lot of them anyway.
Man in the corner (who attended WO Kouth School): Well ain’t that nice, sir.
Editor’s note: Anyone attending the WO course, will begin telling people to go “f” themselves but graduate saying, “well ain’t that nice.
I hope that Coalition forces are able to get Intel on all the local commanders from ISIS who are ordering these killings.
My first hope is that The Iraqis Kill every single Da’esh in the city as they retake it.
My second hope is that If they capture them they conduct a speedy trail and publicly hang all of those found guilty of war crimes.
For those Da’esh who are captured but can’t be tied to war crimes they need to be held as POWs until Da’esh is defeated, and they can be used as bargaining chips to obtain the release of coalition forces or civilians in the hands on ISIS
I’d agree, except that I know that they can no more be trusted than those mama-sans who cleaned the barracks in south Vietnam and told their VC contacts how many bunks were newly made up, how much new laundry there was, how many new pairs of boots had showed up.
I’ve seen films from the mid-1960s of truck convoys in Vietnam with brief shots of girls in ao-dais and those big coolie hats along the roadsides, watching the trucks pass. The very moment the camera hit them, the hats dropped over their faces, and this many years later, I know they were VC spies.
Now, how dumb do we have to be to forget these things? If Giap threw off the Paris Peace Accord and invaded the south as soon as he knew we were pulling out, what does it take to hammer that ‘do NOT trust them’ lesson home?
“Now, how dumb do we have to be to forget these things?”
Pretty dumb, since that kind of thing has happened since the invention of war. Including Iraq and Afghanistan.
And let’s not forget that each and every one of those mama-sans (and papa-sans) was/is authorized to clean those barracks by our senior military leadership. Can’t blame the politicians for that one.
‘authorized by our military leadership’ – that is the problem right there. The difference between friendly and unfriendly in Vietnamese was being able to understand their slang.
We’re far too trusting. I could say that we should get our people out and let those who live there deal with it, but that won’t stop it, will it? No, it will just start up again elsewhere when the rats find a place to start over.
Milosevic’s rampages through Eastern Europe…
Was the blow back of muslims slaughtering the Serbs.
The west doesn’t like it when infidels fight back.
“Islam was never a religion of peace, Islam is the religion of fighting. Noone should believe that the war that we are waging is the war of the Islamic State, it is the are of all Muslims, but the Islamic state is spearheading it. It is the war of Muslims against Infidels.” ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, 14 May 2014
“Bomber” Harris and Curtis Lemay are unavailable for comment.
ISIS/ISIL/DAESH sees itself as the modern caliphate, the religious and political leaders of the Umma, which is the entire Muslim world. Under the Ottoman Empire and previous caliphates, the Caliph left internal conflict up to the locals… partly as a way to maintain control by ensuring that everyone was suspicious of everyone else. The Caliph only mobilized when there was an external threat to the empire. Contrast this with the fact that the ‘nation’ of Iraq didn’t exist until the Brits and French made it up after the Great War. Although the central governments tried to control all of the provinces, the reality is that it never really became a nation state in the sense we mean in the West. ISIS has taken root where it finds sympathizers, mainly in regions where they distrust the central government.. The people of Mosul, a Sunni town, saw ISIS (and AQI ahead of them) as protection against the Shia dominated (and Iranian/Persian supported) government. Remember that Uday and Qusay were holed up there when we found them- that was not a coincidence. Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are not likely to go very far out on a limb to protect the Baathist Sunnis that used to oppress them from the radical Islamist Sunnis that want to oppress them next. I was an advisor with the Iraqi SOF brigade during the surge. Ir seems like they are slow to move and telegraph those moves for weeks before they do anything., but a lot of it is building support with the various elements of the government, tribal leaders, regional leaders, and even commanders. When the PM decided to make his move on Basra, it was a lot of talking about it, then suddenly we were moving. He had to worry about which forces were loyal, which would actually fight, etc. Plus, they have a horrible logistics system and have a hard time sustaining a force of any useful size in the field. The enemy will, of course capitalize on this and may try to slip away. The IEDs and other ‘disruption zone’ tactics are designed to… Read more »
I understand what you’re saying but since you were there, you may understand why my view is that we should either get all of our people out and let them settle it themselves, or flatten the place and make it too poisonous to live there for a very long time.
The only purpose that I can find to the squabble itself is to drain the will and resources of the enemies (everyone NOT ISIS) of the ‘caliphate’. It’s a backward way of holding someone or something prisoner – the war never ends unless one side ends it in an unforgettable way.