New US Airstrikes In Iraq Intended to Protect Important Dam 215
U.S. military involvement in Iraq is heating up again; the sudden rise of the organization known as the Islamic State has put a kink in the gradual, ongoing winding down of U.S. military presence in that country, and today that kink has gotten a little sharper. From The New York Times: The United States launched a fresh series of airstrikes against Sunni fighters in Iraq late Saturday in what Defense Department officials described as a mission to stop militants from seizing an important dam on the Euphrates River and prevent the possibility of floodwaters being unleashed toward the capital, Baghdad. The attacks were aimed at militant fighters of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as they were moving toward the Haditha Dam, officials said. The operation represented another expansion of the limited goals that President Obama set out when he announced last month that he had authorized airstrikes in Iraq.
Get used to it (Score:3)
This struggle will be going on for decades (if we're lucky, longer if not), until the extremists get tired of it and want to live in peace. Until then any talk of "ending the war" is as silly as claiming you can tear down a dam because the river stopped flowing. It stopped flowing because of the dam. Tearing down the dam while the water is still there will have the obvious consequence.
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The "struggle" has been going on since the early 7th Century AD.
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Latent extremists will always be around in all countries. They come to power when there is a power vacuum. This is something we're observing in Iraq right now.
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Until then any talk of "ending the war" is as silly as claiming you can tear down a dam because the river stopped flowing. It stopped flowing because of the dam.
Eh, the idea was that once the Iraqis had built up their own dam, slightly downstream from the US-built temporary dam, that we could remove the US dam and let the Iraqi dam take over.
Unfortunately, it looks like the Iraqi dam was made out of paper-mache... :(
Re:Get used to it (Score:4, Interesting)
You mean the French in Algeria? The Russians in Afghanistan? Who will you blame for what the PLO did in Lebanon, along with Syria?
Islamic extremism has been on the rise for more than 50 years, and is a problem globally. It is a recurring problem through history.
If you don't understand that you are going to go down the wrong path as you were apparently doing just now.
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ISIS formed in Syria and moved into Iraq and controls territory in both. ISIS is only part of the regional struggle of Islamic extremists centered around al Qaida to overthrow the governments in many of the countries. Many extremists from the region came to Syria to overthrow the government there as part of the civil war, and now they are expanding into Iraq. If you don't understand that then you're missing key parts of the issue and will have little useful to add to the discussion.
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Be careful who you chide for missing key parts when you're missing key parts, too.
ISIS formed in Iraq in 1999 as the group that would become al-Qaeda in Iraq. (They change names every so often, probably for media and PR reasons and because their goals change.) They were driven into Syria where they were able to regroup, rearm, and pull in the support of foreign fighters. Once they amassed enough power and made enough deals with Iraqi Sunni emirs, they crossed back and, using the support of various Sunni
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ISIS is only part of the regional struggle of Islamic extremists centered around al Qaida to overthrow the governments in many of the countries.
No they want to eliminate All of the countries, not many of the countries and establish a Caliphate [wikipedia.org] or in other words a Religious Dictatorship, one that would probably make the Iranians look like a bastion of freedom. Of course when the Caliphate doesn't become the "Paradise on Earth" that was promised, it's because the Infadels just over the boarder still exist, justifing yet another Jihad.
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Maybe you could learn to spell out names of things so that we don't decide to interpret it some other, more entertaining way. Assuming we even have a clue what you are trying to insinuate.
Eurasia vs. oceania (Score:5, Insightful)
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Actually it hasn't. Saddam was a murderous butcher that had a body toll well beyond that of ISIS.
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If we're talking body tolls, then George W Bush is responsible for the deaths of more Iraqis than Saddam.
No, not really. Saddam was responsible for the deaths of millions of Iraqis. Getting even more of his people killed while spending that last of force's energies to try to keep him in power was also his fault. Starving even more of them while stealing aid money to buy more weapons and prop up his regime by force was his fault.
I believe we would've been better containing Saddam than the current mess we have.
We do indeed have to put up with lots of bad people in power. But holding our noses while contending with him ceased to be an option. He invaded Kuwait, and we allowed to stay in powe
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Re:Eurasia vs. oceania (Score:5, Insightful)
What recent history has demonstrated is that stable democracy isn't a natural state of affairs that will come to pass if given the chance. One of our biggest mistakes in the Middle East was thinking that the folks over there would embrace democracy once freedom and free elections were established. And we can see the same thing here at home in Europe: people from more or less oppressive states in Africa or the Middle East emigrating to Europe do not wholeheartedly embrace our notion of democracy and freedom as we expected they would.
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What they are doing is over the long term embracing democracy. Those countries have insane borders designed by the French and British as part of the Sykes–Picot Agreement. What's happening now is genuine nation-states are forming where the borders are likely to be people who view themselves as share a common interest. That is forming nation-states. That makes good government possible and thus democracy possible. It is the same process Europe went through.
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A tribe is defined by blood. A nation is defined by things like: language, culture, ethnicity (broader) and history. That's a much larger group than a tribe. A nation is large enough to allow for complex economics, a tribe is not large enough. That's why nation-states are viable but tribal territories are not. Certainly the idea is to replicate some of the affinity one has in a tribe in the nation. For example many of the Americans traumatized and angered 9/11 didn't have anyone related to them that d
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A tribe is defined by blood.
But tribal behavior is pretty well baked into us, genetically, and certainly manifests itself in large groups whether they're fourth cousins twice removed or just plain people who were raised the same way or like the same things. Groupthink on Slashdot frequently looks that way, for example, where people reflexively root for or against some person, meme, or the like simply because that's what their tribe here does.
Tribal-style behavior can exist in groups much larger than kin without that group happenin
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Exactly! That's the idea of a nation. To create the affinity bonds that exist within tribes, or something close, within a much larger group. So yes. We aren't disagreeing.
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Well said AC.
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Not really, toward's the end of Saddam's career in government, his officer corps was being infiltrated by Islamists. He wouldn't have lasted much longer regardless of what the Americans did.
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If Saddam was still in power, he would be major american ally in "fighting terrorists".
Do you remember when Saddam was our ally in fighting what we found inconvenient? But you're way off the mark. We are the global terrorists.
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I'm beginning to think you're never going to get much of this right.
Maybe you can start with this: Who armed Saddam? - Some reality checks [blogspot.com]
And no, the US is not "the global terrorists." If you believe that you are SERIOUSLY misguided.
If you want a pretty easy example (Score:2)
Look at the military hardware the Saddam era Iraqi army used: It wasn't American make, it was Russian/Soviet. Now look at Egypt, a country the US does arm, they are using US equipment.
Unsurprisingly, when countries arm other countries, they do it using their stuff. It is not only convenient, but it is one of those nice political things where you can help your own industries because you are buying from them.
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"shock and awe" campaigns make one a terrorist by the very definition of that word.
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No, they don't. It was conventional military operations, not terrorism.
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Terrorism is using violence to frighten the civilians (that is what the "terror" part of the word is about) to achieve political goals. Bombing a city is terrorism. Whether this is also a conventional military operation is utterly irrelevant. US military has been making terrorist strikes several times in Serbia and in Iraq. I know that you are flag-waving way too hard to accept it but this is the truth.
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The truth isn't what you claim. In the conflicts you reference the US has bombed targets (like a rocket launcher) in cities, not the cities themselves. It isn't trying to destroy the city but rather the military targets in it. Using modern precision guided weapons makes this possible. The goal is not to frighten or terrorize the civilians but to destroy the enemy's military forces. The US often avoids attacking particular targets due to their being located on a protected facility (such as a mosque or h
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If Saddam was still in power, he would be major american ally in "fighting terrorists". Orwell would laugh his ass out if he lived to this day.
No, he wouldn't. Saddam was funding and assisting terrorist, not fighting them.
The present democratically elected Iraqi government is the one fighting terrorists. That government wouldn't exist if Saddam was still in power. It is worth noting that the present government is hampered by widespread corruption, a problem that Saddam made far worse in Iraq than it was.
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So has the US government, when it has served its interests ...
Saddam Hussein and his regime was actually quite proficient and ruthless in clashing down on terrorists activities within the borders of Iraq.
The notion that his regime would have supported the terrorist organisation Al-Qaeda is well known to be a lie by the GWB administration to gain support for their invasion of Iraq for its oil reserves, as part of the Project for t [wikipedia.org]
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Saddam Hussein funded terrorists where he found it appropriate (mostly in other countries) and fought terrorists where he found it appropriate (mostly in Iraq).
Corruption in the government isn't the problem, at least not as we usually think of it. The attempt by previous Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to sideline the Sunnis and Kurds as second-class citizens is the problem. The man basically tried to become a dictator, and it wasn't until the rise of the Islamic State that Iran finally stopped backing him
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No, Saddam wasn't involved with funding al Qaida as far as we know. He was funding other terrorists, including paying money to the families of suicide bombers, and providing refuge for various terrorists.
Saddam did have an advanced nuclear program, and built and used large amounts of chemical weapons. He also built biological weapons.
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Saddam was sending money to the families of suicide bombers encouraging terrorism prior to his death. No he did not help the USA in fighting terrorism.
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I've got a better match for you. Here are just some of the entities that the Islamic State has made enemies of:
- Iraq
- Syria
- Jordan
- Hezbollah
- Free Syria Army
- United States
- Britain
- Iran
- Saudi Arabia
- Russia (maybe)
- al-Qaeda
They're not exactly all on the same side, but they do all oppose the IS. I can't think of a time when a group was more universally opposed.
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The significance of your list assumes that Country = Country's Government. That might be more or less the case for most Western countries with a democratically government. But what about the Arab states. We have no way of knowing if the masses of those countries are actually sympathetic to IS cause (sympathetic until they actually have the chance to live other it). So while a certain Arab government might condemn IS, their support for any US military action might be just that, fighting words without any bit
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I'm not talking about those supporting US military action. That's a separate list. I'm talking about those who have participated in some form of engagement. The only one that is perhaps in doubt is Russia, but they are providing intelligence support, if only relaying information between the US and Syria since neither of those countries wants to admit cooperating with each other.
Those entities above known to be actively fighting the IS:
- Iraq
- Syria
- Hezbollah
- Free Syria Army
- United States
- Iran
- al-Qae
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The significance of your list assumes that Country = Country's Government. That might be more or less the case for most Western countries with a democratically government. But what about the Arab states. We have no way of knowing if the masses of those countries are actually sympathetic to IS cause (sympathetic until they actually have the chance to live other it). So while a certain Arab government might condemn IS, their support for any US military action might be just that, fighting words without any bite. Who knows if this will turn out to be a coalition of one backed up by a peanut gallery of nations unwilling to contribute a single soldier or even let their territory be used as an operations base.
I've got a better match for you. Here are just some of the entities that the Islamic State has made enemies of:
- Iraq - 65% Shia so mostly against.
- Syria - 72% Sunni but currently at war with them and partly living the reality of ISIS rule, so against.
- Jordan - 92% Sunni, relatively secular country, no history of widespread ISIS support but possibly in doubt.
- Hezbollah - Shia militia currently fighting against ISIS in Syria so against.
- Free Syria Army - Relatively secular, moderate and currently at war
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Turkey ....
ISIS holds dozens of Turkish diplomats, their guards and family members after overrunning their consulate in Mosul. And Turkey (along with Qatar, Saudi, the US, etc) was one of the main backers of rebel groups in Syria.
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Good point. Turkey is also, I think, fairly likely to get involved, though they don't want to give the Kurds too many ideas about independence.
Excuse me (Score:2)
If I wanted to read about this shit, I would not come here.
We should bomb the dam ourselves (Score:2)
Drown a few hundred thousand. What's the worst that happens? The liberals blame the Jews?
Why? (Score:2)
Every revolution results in the most brutal, morally crude, religiously exploitive group coming to power. This is a simple function of a free for all fragfest. If we are so revolted by some head chopping, what about French revolution and its guillotine? If US and other countries didn't launch military intervention after similarly brutal bolshevik revolution in Russia, we could have avoided much of cold war, including current Ukrainian episode. Any country would want to establish a friendly buffer zone after
Re:news for nerds? (Score:4, Insightful)
Celebrating diversity!
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And
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400 HECTARES.
That's 4 square km, not ">400km"....
Re:news for nerds? (Score:5, Informative)
They annexed slightly under 100 acred or 4 sq km. Nothing remotely like 400. Seems your not one-sided news is not so good after all.
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Well we are in the process of shifting an area much larger of that to Canada. You don't know about it because it is such a not big deal. People make obvious border adjustments in a spirit of goodwill all the time.
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Is that area settled?
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You are right, that was a typo in my post (not confusion) but a bad typo when correct someone else's numbers. Anyway 400km and 4km are drastically different things. The average farm (median not mean!) is over 1100 acres. We are talking one farm's worth here.
The point of his post was that the USA has bad information about Israel / Palestine and that's nonsense. Having seen the European media (especially the Catholic countries to which the USA media is often unfavorably compared) it seems to be less infor
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You can believe all the fluffy stories that is because of the "hatred for freedom" or that we in Europe are all anti-semitic
But... but... we want to drink the Kool-Aid; it tastes so much better...
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What do you mean, lapdog? The US supports democracies that value liberty and freedom as best we can. Not perfectly of course, but we try. Threatened with destruction constantly, (hell, it's in the Palestinian's charter) we do sell them weapons at close to cost. That's a lot of our 'aid' to them; the discount. They got money, and they pay (not as much as the Saudis..). We have yet to fight directly alongside of Israel, although I assume we would if it really came to that.
Bitter over the UN mandate and Britis
Re:news for nerds? (Score:4, Insightful)
The US supports democracies that value liberty and freedom as best we can.
I respectfully disagree. The US naturally supports its own interests wherever it can. United States support of authoritarian regimes [wikipedia.org]. No matter how bad Sharia law might be the Islamic State guys are tired of foreign interference. They've had enough of everything that's happened after Sykes-Picot and they want the right to self determination. It's no wonder they have so much internal support.
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Whew! For a minute I was worried that nobody would make a facile nonsense comment to distract from the real issues. Thankfully you came through.
Re:news for nerds? (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's a bit of news for you: there are Muslims of every race. If your explanation of things centers around "brown people" in some fashion you completely misunderstand the issues.
And yes, ISIS does exist. It is an offshoot of al Qaida.
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Not quite. It started as a group local to Iraq and led by al-Zarqawi that allied with al-Qaeda in 2004 and was then generally known as al-Qaeda in Iraq. Last year, it announced the merger of itself and the Syrian group al-Nusra; the leader of al-Nusra publicly denied this and asked al-Zawahiri to intercede. He did so and also directed that ISIS tone things down because it was making al-Qaeda and its affiliates look bad, and the head of ISIS told al-Zawahiri to get bent. Since then, al-Qaeda has disavowe
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Re:news for nerds? (Score:5, Funny)
Hello, when you refer to Americans please don't conflate a meddling, incompetent President with Americans in general. Most Americans did not actually vote for that guy, he's lost most credibility in the US and among allies and other countries around the world. Thanks.
Why are you bringing GW Bush into the conversation?
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Technically, no American president has been voted for by "most Americans" since large swaths of the people have been excluded from voting for various reasons (age, gender, race, or ethnicity, depending on the time period). But your attempts to reference the current president fall short since he got the overall majority of the vote in both elections (52% in 2008 and 51% in 2012).
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Hello, when you refer to Americans please don't conflate a meddling, incompetent President with Americans in general. Most Americans did not actually vote for that guy, he's lost most credibility in the US and among allies and other countries around the world. Thanks.
Technically, no American president has been voted for by "most Americans" since large swaths of the people have been excluded from voting for various reasons (age, gender, race, or ethnicity, depending on the time period). But your attempts to reference the current president fall short since he got the overall majority of the vote in both elections (52% in 2008 and 51% in 2012).
2012 General Election Turnout Rates [gmu.edu], Voting-Age Population, 240,926,957, The final popular vote totals were 65,899,660 for Obama-Biden [270towin.com];
65,899,660 / 240,926,957 = 27.3%, pretty blantant that most Americans didn't vote for Obama. In fact with Obama's margin of only 4,967,508,that's close to expected voter fraud rates, it's hard to say how many votes he actually won by.
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You've missed my point. Even if 50%+1 of the voting-age population (we'll leave out those not eligible to vote due to lack of citizenship, felony conviction, dishonorable discharge, etc.) voted for him, it still wouldn't be a majority of all Americans. There were about 313 million people in the US in 2012; half of that would be more people than voted, and would require 77% of the voting-age population. No president is known to have gotten that vote level, let alone overall preference. Washington might h
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221,925,820 was the Voting-Eligible Population, so that would increase the percentage to 29.7%, so way less than a third of eligable voters voted for Obama; 131,799,320 voted for either Obama or Romney so only 59.4% voted period.
On Nov 6, 2012 US population [census.gov] was 314,760,969, 131,799,320 / 314,760,969 = 41.87%, so if all of the people who voted, had voted for Obama it still wouldn't be a majority of all Americans.
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Technically, no American president has been voted for by "most Americans" since large swaths of the people have been excluded from voting for various reasons (age, gender, race, or ethnicity, depending on the time period).
Methinks you forgot apathy/cynicism/disillusionment. There are more people now that don't vote not because they can't vote but because they can't be bothered.
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You're right. Like the Democrats they tend to lean more towards using bombs.
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Strange, when we gave them all those weapons in Syria they were "freedom fighters"!
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Strange, when the Obama administration gave them all those weapons in Syria they were "freedom fighters"!
I fixed that for you.
Re:Terrorists, not Fighters (Score:4, Insightful)
It looks like you need an adult to explain things to you.
Who armed Saddam? - Some reality checks [blogspot.com]
Saddam's weapons came overwhelmingly from the Soviet Union & other Soviet Bloc countries (69% during this period), followed by France (13%) and China (12%) and a string of smaller suppliers. (For example, according to a 1984 SIPRI report, "During 1982-83, Iraq accounted for 40% of total French arms exports.") The figure for the US is 1%.
(The link above is a good bit of background that covers much more than that short extract.)
There are still a lot of Soviet Bloc weapons being used in Iraq. The Interior ministry stuck with AKs, and the armed forces were only partly rearmed with American and Western weapons.
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... keep up appearances by letting them bus/use someone else's weapons to keep up appearances,...
That's hilarious, and nonsense.
Maybe you could explain how the US got all of those Soviet, Warsaw Pact, and Chinese weapons during the height of the Cold War - enough to equip the armed forces of an entire nation? That is utter rubbish. You're grasping at straws.
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Maybe he can't, but I can.
USA has received a shitload of Soviet designed weapons - and I don't mean just small arms, I mean tanks, helicopters, airplanes - starting 1989. From Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary.
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Maybe he can't, but I can.
USA has received a shitload of Soviet designed weapons - and I don't mean just small arms, I mean tanks, helicopters, airplanes - starting 1989. From Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary.
The USA has been buying Soviet made equipment on the black market since the 1980s at least and in large quantities. So if anybody ever wondered where the Soviet weapons came from that the CIA gave to the Afghans to shoot at the Soviets with now you know...
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That might work for relatively limited numbers of small arms to equip guerillas, but not for modern tanks and aircraft, artillery, surface to surface missiles like the SCUD, and antiaircraft missiles and radar used to equip the Iraqi armed forces.
Saddam was mainly armed by the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, and China.
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That even worked for enough titanium to built all the SR-71 airplanes. Bought with the help of several shell companies straight from USSR.
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I expect that you understand that there is a difference between raw commodities like 10 tons of titanium and manufactured finished goods such as an aircraft. The US used the raw materials to build its own aircraft, not manufacture copies of Soviet aircraft generally equivalent to its own high performance aircraft to provide Iraq.
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USA has received a shitload of Soviet designed weapons - and I don't mean just small arms, I mean tanks, helicopters, airplanes - starting 1989. From Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary.
And in the 1960s, 1970s and early to mid 1980s, when Saddam and Iraq were arming, the US didn't have those weapons. So, guess where they came from? That's right, the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact, and China.
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That ones were spent in the Iran-Iraq war.
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Seems plausable, the other thing is the Soviets and other Warsaw Pact countries had armed so many that Soviet designed weapons are pretty ubiquitious in the World. I know people who worked at TACOM [wikipedia.org] who worked full-time installing M60A3 [wikipedia.org] turrets on T72 [wikipedia.org] prime movers for Allies.
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The US didn't use Saddam to fight Iran. Saddam chose to invade Iran and various nations helped prop up Iraq to prevent Iran from rolling over them and taking control of Iraq and possibly the rest of the Middle East.
The Baathists were socialists, and were mainly armed by the bloc of nations controlled by the United Soviet Socialist Republics.
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Iraq and Iran had been fighting over the delta for decades. Goes back to the Shaw's days at least.
Once Iran lost it's status as American Ally it lost that protection too. Sheit/Sunni is a very old war that has never stopped.
You realize there is a difference between 'Socialist' (dumb philosophy) and 'Communist' (mostly Russian funded, at least during the cold war era and distant from China)? Yes, it is now _proven_ that the American Communist Party was founded by a soviet agent and recieved regular fund
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LOL. Whatever, lying douchebag, the facts around that war are well documented. You can deny them, but they won't disappear because of that.
That's right, the facts won't disappear, and I've just presented them.
You possess the aggressive ignorance of Dubya and O'Really. Go learn about the sad fate of the Iraqi communists and come back to us with your fantasies about the "socialism" of Saddam's regime.
Why don't you look into the fate of the parties that competed with the Bolsheviks in Russia, and the Nationalist Socialists in Germany and see if you can extrapolate.
Maybe the "United Soviet Socialist Republics" exist in whatever online game you've cut your strategic teeth, but in the real world there was no such entity.
Close enough to say yes: Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [wikipedia.org]
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However, that still doesn't make Saddam Hussein a part of the Soviet bloc, no matter how you dislike this stubborn fact.
I never claimed that Saddam's Iraq was part of the Soviet bloc, only that they bought their weapons there. It is sort of like you don't have to be an employee of Tesco to buy goods there.
When Iraq attacked Iran, Saddam had good relations with the West, because the West was in a disposition to beat the shit out of Iran. Iraq used the said good relations to get loans and import weapons. Lots of weapons, for a lot of shooting, at Iran, at the Kurds, et cetera. These are the facts.
So then, we agree that Saddam attacked Iran for his own reasons? Good, since those are the facts.
You don't even know the names of the countries you write about, this is how ignorant you are. Just like Dubya, who kept eye-racking Iraq until he got out of office. Did he ever learn how to pronounce it correctly?
And yet you understood the entire time what President Bush was referring to, and what I was referring to, and decided to avoid discussing the substance of the argument and quibbled about minor things. You aren't proving yours
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There are dozens of rebel factions in Syria. The weapons were sent largely to those a part of or allied with the Free Syrian Army, a group with secular aims. It's not surprising that they ended up in other hands, given the chaos.
But the US isn't the most prolific supplier of weapons. That goes to a group of countries led by Saudi Arabia. They're sending weapons to try to overthrow al-Assad to weaken the regional influence of Iran.
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I doubt that the US gov would have supported IS directly, but I think that it is very likely that they would have supported other groups fighting the Assad regime - and that those groups' resources have been
conquered by the IS.
It is known that many fighters in Syria who belonged to other groups have been forced into squads belonging to the IS, and that many of these would deflect from IS if they had the chance.
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It's absolutely not true that all money and weapons came from USA. ISIS simply seized the weapons of the regular Iraqi military. While there were some American weapons in that cache, which the western TV networks love to display, most of the weapons they got were Soviet or Russian. And in fact, the Soviet/Russian weapons are the deadliest weapons that ISIS has. The American weapons are very high tech and very expensive to maintain (think about toys like M1 Abrams tank), while the Soviet weapons were designe
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That is nonsense. The US government provided arms to the Iraqi government. The Iraqi government lost control
The US began arming [washingtonpost.com] Syrian rebels with small arms and other supplies almost a year ago.
Back then your MSM still had you cheering for the "Arab Spring" and Assad was the bad guy. Remember that? The narrative then was the noble and oppressed peoples of the Middle East rising up to topple puppet dictators and NPR et. al. were thrilled. So we gave these noble fighters weapons.
Yay!
Predictably, however, the Islamists started filling trenches with the bodies of infidels. The "Arab Spring" meme had to be quietl
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Then, at least, there will be no more nasty little low-intensity squabbles as we try to referee this crap and all doubt about the threat Islam poses to the species will be gone.
one can dream
You were doing fairly well until the very end.
Bigotry aside, it's extremely naive to assume this is fundamentally motivated by religion.
The Islamists are not doing anything essentially different than what can be seen in Africa,
where you have warlords controlling large swaths of territory with no religious motivations.
Bigotry is blinding you to realpolitik.
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Maintaining the stalemate is a much better tactic for the 'western world'.
Your scenario might finally force the Arab world to grow the fuck up, but I doubt it. They need a WWI all their own, pump oil like crazy, use the money to buy guns from us. All good, even dare I say it...Excellent. /Burns
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It's not 2003 any more. Iraq has a democratically elected government, and has for about 10 years now. The Iraqi army was rebuilt and rearmed with large amounts of weaponry. ISIS is mainly coming from Syria, not Iraq. You've got this pretty much wrong.
Re:US policy: first arm them then bomb (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not 2003 any more. Iraq has a democratically elected government, and has for about 10 years now. The Iraqi army was rebuilt and rearmed with large amounts of weaponry. ISIS is mainly coming from Syria, not Iraq. You've got this pretty much wrong.
Bullshit, you can't just reduce this to Weapons. Weapons are only as good as the people who operate them and they are only as good as those who lead them. Everything that has happened in Iraq since 2003 has been influenced by American meddling. Ibrahim al-Jaafari was replaced as Prime Minister of Iraq after the Bush White House became displeased with him due to his inability to curb the insurgency (which was not surprising in view of the fact that the army had been disbanded and some of the best troops had joined the insurgency). Iraq may have had democratic elections but the selection of parties and candidates available for election was carefully engineered by the USA and the same goes when it came to choosing which people occupied key government posts. Eye witness accounts of the search for a successor to al-Jaafari reminded me of the Praetorian's hunt for a new Roman emperor after the demise of Caligula. Having no idea who to replace Caligula with they finally found Claudius hiding behind a curtain and made him emperor and the US had given no more thought to who would replace al-Jaafari than the Pretorians had done when they disposed of Caligula. Finally the White House just chose Nouri al-Maliki, next best guy they could find without having any idea of how capable he was or whether he'd be an inclusive leader or a divisive one. The White House knew so little about al-Maliki that they mispronounced his name until he personally corrected them. Al-Maliki was so inexperienced he had to get weekly tutorial sessions from George W Bush Jr over video link (talk about dub leading dumber). It is this choice that is now coming back to bite the Obama administration along with it's own lack of interest in what is happening in Iraq. Yes the army was trained, yes the Sons of Iraq effort created a chance at reconciliation and yes It was al-Maliki, America's chosen man who de-Sunnified the government and civil service, it was he who fired all the US trained officers and replaced them with militarily inept cronies to coup-proof the army and it was his sectarian policies who sparked the campaign of repression that eventually led to the 'ISIS invasion' which in reality is a full blown Sunni revolt. Iraq today is very much America's mess and that is why the Europeans may be willing to join in the fight against ISIS by helping the Iraqi Kurds and possibly the YPG in Syria but they will remain unwilling to touch Iraq proper with a 16 foot pike. That's America's mess and it will have to be America who deals with it along with (irony abounds) Iran.
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Iraq had a majoritarian government not a democratic government. Democratic governments represent the public interest. Iraq's government represented a sects interests. And not shockingly another sect is now rejecting that government.
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While you and others are mostly correct, portions of Iraq's army folded, mostly those who joined for a paycheck (which was a lot of them). Those in the field now are from a more dedicated core and are fighting much more effectively. When they face up against Islamic State forces, they tend to hold the upper hand, especially when air power is available.
One of the things that needs to happen--and is a key demand of certain Sunni tribes--is the reinstatement of a number of former officers who were purged fro
Stop making sense. (Score:2)
You ought to know personal ideology almost always trumps cold hard facts ; ).
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I find that it's not so much ideology as a desire to boil down the situation to the simplest form in an effort to win the argument. Sometimes this works when certain nuances aren't significant, but it's easy to go too far. The most common one I see is treating all Syrian rebels as if they're part of the IS, when it's a patchwork of groups with many goals.
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Europe gets it gas mostly from the ruskies, oil mostly from the middle east.
The only part of that that can even change is the gas, which would require the euros to pull their heads out of their asses and allow fracking. Even that would take a couple of years. I think the Polish have already started. Which has to factor in the Russians cutting a long term contract with the Chinese.
Gas liquefaction could also reduce the price disparity/Russias pricing power. But I'm skeptical it will be more then a drop
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I think this is a simple case of "you break it, you buy it".
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If that's the case, the Brit's really need to own up and clean out [wikipedia.org] their mess.
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Implies it wasn't a mess before we got there.
GW Bush restored the Sunni/Sheia war, putting it back the way western europe found it. No need to thank him. Oil should be sucked mostly dry soon, so restoring the irrelevance too.
Now we're just enforcing a stalemate. Bet we wouldn't be doing a thing to ISIS if they weren't winning. See also Iran/Iraq war.
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That's why there is a significant effort to bring the Sunni emirs back to Baghdad's side, starting with the new Prime Minister. The IS itself doesn't have much in the way of forces (ranging somewhere around 10,000, maybe a bit more), but instead relies on allied emirs to provide fighters.
And the army has stepped up. While Shi'ite militias have certainly helped, the Iraqi Army has retaken most of Tikrit and broken the siege at Amerli. It's slow progress, but it is weeding out many of those who just joined
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Sending IS back to hell with airpower is easy when they are out in the open. But once Islamic State fighters retreat to towns like Fallujah it will be very difficult to twist them out of their holes. It will require house to house fighting and the towns will be more or less destroyed in the process with great cost to any civilians in the area. If the Shiite dominated Iraq Army does it there will be all kinds of payback. But I doubt they will step up. It will be up to mostly the US with help from the UK and some token help from a few other countries.
Colin Powell was right. We broke it, we bought it.
This is exactly what happened in Gaza the past few weeks, to weed out Hamas.