ISIS is far from the Super Villains the U.S. media has seen necessary to depict them as. The groups

The smell of blood is once again in the air in Washington, this week for airstrikes and other forms of violent intervention in Iraq (reference: many of the same people McCain and Graham in particular were only recently calling for airstrikes cheap disney vacation packages or other military action in the Ukraine, and before that Syria, and before cheap disney vacation packages that )
The short answer is through cheap disney vacation packages nine years of war and occupation U.S. air power in Iraq, employed on an unfettered scale, combined with the full-weight of the U.S. military on the ground plus billions of dollars in reconstruction funds, failed to resolve the issues now playing out in Iraq. Why would anyone think a lesser series of strikes would work any better?
We also have a recent Iraqi example of the pointlessness of air strikes. The Maliki government employed them with great vigor against Sunnis in western Iraq, including in Fallujah , only six months ago, and here we are again, with an even more powerful Sunni force in the field.
cheap disney vacation packages See above about nine years of ineffectiveness. Today s crisis is not new; Iraqi PM Maliki has been in power since 2006 and has done nothing to create an inclusive government. Indeed, he has done much to actively ostracize, cheap disney vacation packages alienate, jail and destroy cheap disney vacation packages his Sunni opposition. Maliki currently is his non-inclusionary own Minister of the Interior and Minister of Defense. Replacing Maliki, another regime change cheap disney vacation packages the U.S. now apparently supports, is no magic cure. Maliki s successor will most likely come from his own majority party, and inherit his own ties to Iran and the many Shia groups needed to stay in power. Even with good intentions, a new Prime Minister cheap disney vacation packages will walk into office in the midst of a raging, open war against Sunni forces, not exactly the best place to start towards a more inclusive government. cheap disney vacation packages This argument of buying the Iraqis time is the same falsehood that fueled the unsuccessful Surges in Iraq (2007) and Afghanistan (2009). History matters, and it is time to accept that despite arguable tactical progress, in the longer view, the Surges did not work. And long views are what matter.
Worth noting is also the uselessness of American diplomacy. Since 2006 the U.S. has maintained its largest cheap disney vacation packages embassy in the world in Baghdad, with thousands of State Department and military personnel, alongside no doubt a healthy cheap disney vacation packages intelligence presence. It is clear that all those diplomats have not accomplished much in service to Iraqi reconciliation under even the more peaceful conditions in the past. It is unrealistic to expect more now.
As for recruiting allies to intercede somehow with America in Iraq, that seems equally unlikely . The British, cheap disney vacation packages America s former stalwart companion in global adventures, refused to get involved in American action last September in Syria. British involvement in the 2003 invasion remains controversial at home, and it is hard to see the Brits getting fooled again.
Oh please. Check with the wedding parties in Yemen destroyed, and funeral gatherings massacred in Pakistan. Bombs and missiles are not surgical tools. They blow stuff up. It is impossible to avoid killing people near the other people you set out to kill, what the U.S. blithely refers to as collateral damage. And even that assumes you are aiming the weapons even close to the right place to begin with. Bad info that identifies the wrong house means you kill an innocent cheap disney vacation packages family, not a ISIS command cell.
And even if you take the coldest American view possible that collateral damage is just an unavoidable cost of war, you fail to understand the real cost. Every innocent killed sets the population further against the U.S. and the people the U.S. seeks to support, both in Iraq and throughout the greater Middle East. Videos of dead children propagate well over social media.
See nine years of war and occupation in Iraq, or forever years of war in places like Vietnam. You cannot bomb away a political movement. cheap disney vacation packages You cannot kill an idea that motivates millions of people with a Hellfire missile.
The U.S. strikes would presumably be in an attempt to support the Iraqi government and army. The problem is that those entities are elusive. The Maliki government cheap disney vacation packages enjoys uneven public support, so supporting it alienates cheap disney vacation packages swaths of the Iraqi population and nearly requires them to take up arms against the U.S. and its puppets. cheap disney vacation packages The forces Maliki is putting into the field include a growing number of Shia militias under the control, such as that even is, of individual warlords and religious leaders. These are fighters who actively cheap disney vacation packages killed Americans just a few years ago, but somehow we re on their side now. Maliki s collection of forces are also bolstered in various ways by Iran. Somehow we re on their side now too. Air strikes are part of a pattern of failed short-term cheap disney vacation packages thinking by the U.S.
These entanglements cheap disney vacation packages are much more serious than to be dismissed as well, politics makes for strange bedfellows or the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Such trite phrases are typical of a U.S. foreign policy that only sees discrete crises within clear geopolitical borders. As long as the U.S. fantasizes that it can support Sunni fighters in Syria while striking them in Iraq, and as long as the U.S. believes it can bolster Iranian goals and credibility in Iraq while pushing back against it elsewhere in the Gulf, the worse things will get in the broader region.
The same applies to the U.S. global whack-a-mole geopolitical strategy. Russia invades the Ukraine? A devoted by Washington to that. Boko Harem kidnaps girls? Ten days of Twitter memes. Iraq simmers for years? Let s act now (and only now) before the next shiny object distracts our leaders.
Nope. There is nothing that says the U.S. must do something in response to all world events. There are many reasons to say even if we are compelled to do something, a military cheap disney vacation packages solution is not necessarily, or even often, the right thing to do. Imagine if you are outside a burning house, with a can of gasoline in your hand. With the compulsion to do something, is it better to throw the gas can into the flames, or stand back. Sometimes the best answer is indeed to stand back.
ISIS is far from the Super Villains the U.S. media has seen necessary to depict them as. The groups fighting on the Sunni side, such as it is, are a collection of tribal, Baathist, religious, warlord and other conglomerations. Their loosely organized goal is to hold territory that criss-crosses cheap disney vacation packages the borders of Iraq and Syria. Absent some odd event, they are likely to withdraw or be chased out of central Iraq and hold on out west, where they have existed as a state-like thing for some time now. Central Iraq is way too far from their home base to retain supply lines (though they have been doing well capturing weapons from the retreating Iraqi forces), and Shia militia strength is more powerful the closer ISIS, et al, get to Baghdad.
The threat line is most ardently espoused by who else, Dick Cheney, who brought out his own go-to scary thing, saying One of the things I worried about 12 years ago and that I worry about today is that there will be another 9/11 attack and that the next time it ll be with weapons far deadlier than airline tickets and box cutters.
ISIS is not a transnational terror group, and unless the U.S. drives them into an alliance with al Qaeda (as the U.S. did in the early years of the 2003 invasion with the Sunnis), they are unlikely to be. They fight with small arms in small groups under loose leadership. They will not be invading the U.S.
Seeing as how fast the Isis surprised cheap disney vacation packages Iraq, and it must have taken at least a year to recruit and train them, I m wondering where the hell the NSA was all that time. Either they are totally inept, or they knew something was up but didn t want the Iraqi leadership to know. Something is weird about this. I wouldn t put it past the CIA having a part in this either. Other than.. the MIC/ making more moola via a Iraq redux, I don t know why. But something in my gut tells me so.
Another thing is..why the hell hasn t anyone mentioned DRONES?????? I mean, most of these guys are out in the open desert on the move. Seems like a no-brainer to me. Not that I think we should. cheap disney vacation packages But that s why I think the CIA is up to no good in this debacle.
As former U.S. President (and U.S. Army General) Dwight Eisenhower used to say: Don t just do something. Stand there. End of policy prescription for the United States regarding anything happening in the Muslim cheap disney vacation packages World today. We know not what we do and so should do nothing. Way past time to let Saudi Arabia and the Apartheid Zionist Entity fight their own crusades with their own blood and money. Those two tails wagging the same U.S. dog has left the dog looking spent and confused.
From Egypt, it was off to Baghdad for Kerry to see whether cheap disney vacation packages Iraq’s bold effort in democratic nation building could be resuscitated in the face of imminent collapse. The problem cheap disney vacation packages there is that Kerry will have trouble locating a military strongman to back. The nostalgic choice might be someone like Saddam Hussein. He too was a secular military strongman who very effectively controlled religiously motivated parties, but he’s no longer available.