Tag: iraq

I guess the Left is comfortable with our quiet troop buildup in Iraq.

Refreshing: despite my earlier sardonic commentary about Democrats rolling over on this, I still wondered whether we’d have more progressives protesting over this. Or rioting.  Guess even the most hardcore Lefty can detect a brick wall after he’s run into it six or seven times.

The United States has sent Apache attack helicopters to Iraq as part of the buildup in U.S. military personnel, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

Officials would not say how many of the armed helicopters have been sent to the country, stating only that they will be based in Baghdad and could assist with evacuations of American personnel.

…Yes, I suppose that they could. Or they could be there for airstrikes against the terrorist army that Barack Obama unaccountably just let set up shop again in Iraq. Continuing on…

The Pentagon also sent over additional surveillance drones.

President Obama on Monday sent 200 additional U.S. troops to Iraq to protect diplomatic facilities and personnel amid growing fears that Sunni militants in the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) could overrun the country. The order brought the total number of U.S. ground forces in Iraq to 750.

Continue reading I guess the Left is comfortable with our quiet troop buildup in Iraq.

Israel inching towards recognizing Kurdistan, whether the White House likes it or not.

An independent Kurdish state is becoming more likely to happen all the time.

The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has voiced support for Kurdish statehood, taking a position that appears to clash with the US preference to keep sectarian war-torn Iraq united.

Pointing to the mayhem in Iraq, Netanyahu on Sunday called for the establishment of an independent Kurdistan as part of a broader alliance with moderate forces across the region…

I hope that the White House is prepared for the possibility. Because if it happens, it will happen fast.

To understand Iraq in 2014, look no further than the USA in 2008.

The Wall Street Journal, in the process of mentioning just how badly Barack Obama’s administration urinated away years of hard work in Iraq, mentions this minor bit of too little, too late*:

…at the end of April, the Pentagon dispatched a team of special-operations personnel to assess the capabilities of Iraq’s security forces, a defense official said.

The assessment they brought back was bleak: Sunni Army officers had been forced out, overall leadership had declined, the Iraqi military wasn’t maintaining its equipment and had stopped conducting rigorous training. The response in Washington, summed up by a senior U.S. official, was: “Whoa, what the hell happened here?”

Permit me to answer that:

2008

(Via 270 to Win.)

This was the goal. This was what the Democrats ran on. This is what they wanted, and now they have it. Don’t look at me: I voted for the other guys.

Moe Lane

*This has been a constant theme of this administration.  It’s a natural byproduct of a situation where we have a bunch of people who have an inflated opinion of both their competence, and their ability to improvise.  Alas, we simply have to grin and bear it until January 2017…

Turkey: An independent Kurdistan? What a FINE idea!

Apparently the rules of the game have changed:

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region—The Kurds of Iraq have the right to decide the future of their land, said Huseyin Celik, a spokesman for Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) on Friday.

“The Kurds of Iraq can decide for themselves the name and type of the entity they are living in,” Celik told Rudaw in an interview to be published soon.

The AKP is the party of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan under whom Ankara and Erbil have built strong economic and diplomatic relations.

In case Iraq gets partitioned, said Celik, “the Kurds, like any other nation, will have the right to decide their fate.”

To answer Ace of Spades’s question of why Turkey is doing this now: it’s because the Kurds are happy to sell things to Turks, like access to vacation facilities… and more importantly, oil. Lots and lots of oil.  Under circumstances like that, arrangements can, as they say, be made.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: You may be asking yourself, If Turkey really is fine with an independent Kurdistan now, what’s going to stop the Kurds from taking away, say, Mosul from ISIS? That’s… an interesting question.

So Eisenhower- sorry, Obama – is going to send advisors to South Vietnam – sorry, Iraq.

Temporarily, to be sure.

The White House is considering sending a small number of American special forces soldiers to Iraq in an urgent attempt to help the government in Baghdad slow the nation’s rampant Sunni insurgency, U.S. officials said Monday.

While President Barack Obama has explicitly ruled out putting U.S. troops into direct combat in Iraq, the plan under consideration suggests he would be willing to send Americans into a collapsing security situation for training and other purposes.

Mind you, sending advisers and trainers is not something that I am against doing.  Then again, I was against pulling out our troops in Iraq in the first place, largely because it was far too early to leave and I figured that we’d just have to go back.  Which is what is appearing to be happening, here.  And if you think that I’m going to pass up this opportunity to remind the least-historically ignorant of the Left about their own misty-hued past via noting the parallels between this situation and the one in South Vietnam… well, I’m not. This is how it starts, ye Democrats.  Have fun kicking yet another one of your principles in the testicles a few times.

Via

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: You can, I suppose, make the argument that the Democrats will actually fight tooth and nail any reintroduction of American troops in Iraq. That argument reminds me of a Dorothy Parker poem:

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania.

You may not be aware that the Turkey/Not-Kurdistan situation has calmed considerably.

Well, isn’t this an interesting little article.

Years ago, the Kurds turned away from Baghdad to Ankara, in the hopes of finding a new regional champion. And, surprise surprise, in Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, they found such a partner. In a striking turnaround from 2007, when the Turks were so afraid of Kurdish secession they positioned 200,000 troops on the Kurdish border, Turkey has more recently embraced Kurdistan as a moderate partner and an important steady source of oil, as Turkey seeks to cement itself as the oil gateway from the Middle East to Europe.

Turkey doesn’t yet support Kurdish independence, but Erdogan has been making progress to normalize relations with his own Kurdish population in the south, freeing the head of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) resistance group and recognizing Kurdish as a language. The border, once lined with troops, is now open and flowing with goods and tourist traffic that moves both ways.

Translation: the Turks don’t care if the Kurds keep Kirkuk. And they very well might not care if the Kurds take Mosul, either.  Or any other parts of Kurd-populated territories that aren’t in Turkey itself.

ISIS reportedly engaged in mass murder, other war crimes in Iraq.

I do not know whether the pictures found at this link [have been] authenticated, but if these pictures do end up being authenticated so then it needs to be stated for the record that ISIS (or ISIL) is engaged in war crimes and that its members are most emphatically not lawful combatants.  Barack Obama and the rest of the Left aside, this means that if local authorities decide to have a quick (as in, that afternoon) trial and hang any ISIS member they catch, they actually can do it.  And frankly, they should.

And even more frankly?  If we had hanged some of these people when we had the chance, ISIS wouldn’t be doing as well now.  A lot of Iraqis are going to die for the sake of a lot of European/American antiwar-liberals’ delicate sensibilities.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: I see no particular reason why anybody fighting ISIS should accept any surrender offered by ISIS’s rank-and-file. Because God help whoever ISIS captures, apparently.

I’m going to go with ‘Mitt Romney is not an idiot,’ myself.

Not ‘time travel:’ and note that that’s the answer that Ryan Williams favors. Shoot, Justen Charters (the originator of the ‘time travel’ argument) would agree: the reason that Mitt Romney accurately called in 2007 what would happen in 2014 if somebody was so stupid as to let Iraq collapse is because it was so bloody obvious what would happen.

Choice of adjective deliberate.  I’d never thought I’d see a President so unwise as to defecate in his own blankets, but apparently that’s just a thing that Barack Obama does.

Moe Lane

PS: Of course Mitt Romney would have made a better President than the current one.  This is fairly self-evident, no?

Tweet of the Day, While We’re Waiting For Barack Obama To Show Up edition.

Barack Obama would up five points in the polls if he’d just show up for things on time, by the way. Anyway:

Ayup.

The Kurds have decided to, ah, ‘stabilize’ Kirkuk.

No doubt purely temporarily, until the situation resolves itself:

Iraqi Kurdish forces say they have taken full control of the northern oil city of Kirkuk as the army flees before an Islamist offensive nearby.

“The whole of Kirkuk has fallen into the hands of peshmerga,” Kurdish spokesman Jabbar Yawar told Reuters. “No Iraq army remains in Kirkuk now.”

Kurdish fighters are seen as a bulwark against Sunni Muslim insurgents.

:Murmuring: Tsk, tsk. Bad future reliable American client state! Bad! No biscuit! Continue reading The Kurds have decided to, ah, ‘stabilize’ Kirkuk.