The fall of Iraq: those helicopters left the roof a long time ago
As soon as Obama was elected it was a foregone conclusion that this would be the result in Iraq—that the country would be taken over by the worst forces in the area. Since then, it’s just been the slow denouement:
Insurgents seized control early Tuesday of most of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, including the provincial government headquarters, offering a powerful demonstration of the mounting threat posed by extremists to Iraq’s teetering stability.
Fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an al-Qaeda offshoot, overran the entire western bank of the city overnight after Iraqi soldiers and police apparently fled their posts, in some instances discarding their uniforms as they sought to escape the advance of the militants…
The collapse of government forces in Mosul echoed the takeover earlier this year of the town of Fallujah in western Anbar province, where U.S. troops fought some of their fiercest battles of the Iraq war…
The Iraqi government is calling for international and/or US help, “by virtue of the Joint Cooperation agreement between the two countries.” But that horse left the barn a long time ago, and there are not even any residual US forces left in the country:
In order to land an effective fighting force to defend Baghdad and retake Mosul, we would need to commit tens of thousands of troops and a large amount of materiel in a big hurry. Logistically speaking, that would be a feat worthy of George S. Patton and the Battle of the Bulge in order for us to get to Baghdad before ISIS does, especially with Iraqi security forces collapsing.
Politically speaking, it’s a dead letter.
David French at National Review thinks Obama’s policy on Iraq demonstrates his foolishness rather than his knavishness:
At the heart of the Obama administration’s folly is a set of unshakeable convictions ”” gained through long-term exposure to the total nonsense that passes for foreign-policy analysis in America-hating quarters of elite academia ”” that jihadist rage is ultimately grounded in a series of legitimate complaints against America and Israel (rather than in its own dedication to Islamic supremacy), that concessions improve relations, and that the right kind of tone and respect for Islam will soothe hurt feelings and build bridges of trust. In reality, the jihadist mindset can be summed up in eight simple words: “Give them nothing, but take from them everything.”
I beg to differ, although it makes sense because Obama is both a narcissist and a man who used to present himself as a liberal, and liberals do actually believe that sort of thing. But Obama really doesn’t care all that much about making peace there, although that would be a nice feather in his cap, too. What else might be motivating Obama’s Iraq policy? He was and still is eager to (1) placate his base, which has always been against the war in Iraq (2) reduce and then eliminate America’s influence in the region and around the world (3) undo the work and efforts of his predecessor George Bush and his enemies the Republicans; and (4) reduce and then eliminate trust in America around the world (which is related to #2 but not exactly the same).
Whether Obama cares much about what actually happens to Iraq and the Iraqis depends on whether he’s trying to promote the jihadi cause around the world. Certainly it seems so more and more, especially after the release of the Taliban Five, which threatens to help complete the same job in Afghanistan. But his policies could just be a subset of his wanting to take America down a peg or two—or three or four or more. Perhaps he doesn’t really give a hoot what happens to the Iraqis or the Afghans, and the pullout has advanced his other aforementioned political and geopolitical purposes.
At any rate, this is certainly true:
This [the takeover of Mosul] is the reason why it made sense to keep American forces in Iraq as a back-up to Iraqi security forces, but that option is all but dead now. Unless Iraq finds some deep well of nationalistic strength and repels ISIS on its own, the only democratic Arab republic may be very short-lived indeed.
Whatever Obama’s true motivations, by the time he got elected the public’s sentiment on Iraq had reached the point that it would have taken a strong resolve on the part of a US president to stay there. Bush had that resolve. Obama not only did not have it, he had the opposite: a strong resolve to leave.
And so it has all come to pass.
[NOTE: The title of this piece refers of course to the fall of Saigon. From the start of the war in Iraq, the left has been working to recreate that scenario.]
[ADDENDUM: Mosul is on the site of Nineveh. Remember Nineveh? Lest we forget…]
Neo: “Whatever Obama’s true motivations, by the time he got elected the public’s sentiment on Iraq had reached the point that it would have taken a strong resolve on the part of a US president to stay there.”
I disagree. At the point Obama bungled the SOFA negotiation, the Iraq mission was quieting, even becoming routine, much like the trajectory of the Korea mission.
The Korea mission was also highly unpopular with calls to pull out precipitously. Ike even campaigned on a promise to ‘end’ the Korean War at a time when the US global leadership role was much less established. The Iraq that Obama inherited from Bush was also much better off than the Korea that Ike inherited from Truman.
The difference is Ike stayed the course from Truman in order to secure, build, and guarantee the long-term peace for South Korea. We’re still doing so there.
If Obama wanted to secure the peace, the Iraq mission was well on its way to settling into the familiar pattern of sustainable and uncontroversial equilibrium established in our long-term European and Asian peace-building partnerships from WW2 onward.
Truman was hounded out of office for the Korean War, but history vindicated the Democrat president’s fateful choice in 1950 because his Republican successor stayed the course. Obama did not repeat Ike’s ‘mistake’.
Dems want the US to lose wars. Harsh? See history.
Is there any reason to predict this would not happen next time?
Eric:
I don’t think there’s any real disagreement between us. To elaborate by what I meant: the MSM and the Democrats had worked on the public re Iraq for many years, and had turned a lot of people against it (more and more over time), as had the fact that the peace-making was more difficult and costly than many people had expected. That does not mean that a president with strong resolve wouldn’t have been able to institute a policy to stay the course in Iraq in 2008 if he/she was a strong leader and could make a good argument for staying and follow it up with policy that worked.
The situation in Iraq in 2008 was indeed better than it had been in years, and there was no reason at that point to pull out the way Obama had made it clear he would, but public opinion was certainly not strongly for the war and was in fact against it (see especially the third chart here, but all the charts are informative). The main point I was trying to make there was that leadership could have tipped the balance either way, but by the time Obama came to power the Iraq War was more unpopular than popular with the American public.
I wrote this on my blog in January when Fallujah fell:
The feared consequence of the Obama administration’s weakness in the Arab Spring, abandonment of President Bush’s Freedom Agenda, and bungling of the SOFA negotiation causing our irresponsible exit from Iraq is becoming real.
The enemy defeated by the Counterinsurgency “Surge” in Iraq and greatly reduced by the US-led post-9/11 counter-terrorism campaign has resurged in the collapse of the Arab Spring, especially the Syrian war, and the gaps left by President Obama’s diminishment of American leadership in the region.
Like our regional partners in Asia and Europe where US soldiers still serve, COIN-saved Iraq with American partnership should have been the cornerstone of regional reform. President Obama, 19May11:
The Arab Spring should have been the decisive point where strong American leadership characterized by the Bush Freedom Agenda, and Iraq the model, seized the historical moment.
President Obama should have stayed the course he inherited from President Bush as President Eisenhower stayed the course he inherited from Presidents Roosevelt and Truman.
Instead, the utter squandering of the hard-won promising, but still-tenuous, gains that President Obama inherited from the Bush administration and the fecklessness of the Obama administration’s foreign affairs at a critical turning point in world affairs have brought on a predictable, evitable disaster.
Moved by 9/11, President Bush wore the mantle of American leadership of the free world and set us on a liberal course to compete for the shape of our children’s world. America’s self-labeled liberals should have stood strong with President Bush. Instead, he was vilified by then-Senator Obama and his cohort.
Because of their betrayal, we have moved a long, long way from President Kennedy’s pledge (1961), “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” and President Clinton’s counsel (1998) that “In the century we’re leaving, America has often made the difference between chaos and community; fear and hope. Now, in a new century, we’ll have a remarkable opportunity to shape a future more peaceful than the past — but only if we stand strong against the enemies of peace.”
In July 2003, former President Clinton urged:
Instead, the Democrats chose to sacrifice America’s liberal leadership heritage and life-or-death responsibility to the people of Iraq for partisan gain. From Robert Gates, former defense secretary, offers harsh critique of Obama’s leadership in ‘Duty’, by Bob Woodward, in the Washington Post:
On these admissions alone of their rank self-interest and parochial partisanship trumping the grave stakes in Iraq, Secretary Clinton and President Obama should be pilloried and disqualified from Commander in Chief.
President Bush handed to President Obama a history-changing winning hand in Iraq, earned with dear cost, and a progressing liberal strategy to win the War on Terror, and President Obama threw them away. Bush honored the commitment of his predecessors to American leadership of the free world. Obama has dishonored it and them – and us – and opened the way for the illiberal enemy.
It’s enough to push this Generation-X JFK liberal to give up in disgust.
Eric:
Agreed.
And it was clear the day Obama was elected in 2008 that this would eventually happen. Like a Greek tragedy where you already know the plot.
In fact, I started to worry seriously about it quite early in the Iraq War when I saw what the left was doing. I knew they would never give up. I was worried it would happen in 2004 if Bush lost the election, but it was just postponed to 2008.
I still cannot understand why so many independents and even Republicans voted for Obama in 2008.
Eric:
Please also read this.
Logistically speaking, that would be a feat worthy of George S. Patton and the Battle of the Bulge in order for us to get to Baghdad before ISIS does, especially with Iraqi security forces collapsing.
Well, first of all, Patton was heading an army that didn’t exist hanging out at the pas de Calais.
Second, Patton is a four star general, not a pencil pushing “radar” quartermaster who does logistics. What he does is threaten, punish and reward based on action and outcome…
Good logistics alone can’t win a war.
Bad logistics alone can lose it.
–General Brehon B. Somervell
Commanding General
Army Services Forces, 1942
However things are very different today…
you would be very surprised at how fast something CAN be done now, and how small a force is needed to start… however, the size of the force also depends on the “rules of engagement”…
that is.. you can do a heck of a lot with 100 special forces men and no limits… you cant do anywhere near as much with 1,000 marines and limits and evne less with 10,000 and bizarre rules…
but whats TERRIBLY FRUSTRATING is that we look to entertainers to give us knowlege.
……that jihadist rage is ultimately grounded in a series of legitimate complaints against America and Israel (rather than in its own dedication to Islamic supremacy)…….
that logic is the kind of bad thing they give others to follow to their doom, while blaming osmoene else.
funny thing about people, they will rather stand in sh*t and blame someone else rather than move and stand elsehwere… .
you cant analyse a sociopaths ends by using your own thinking!!! what you would find not even considerable, they would find just another option… you would never induce children to die in the desert for an end, but he doesnt care and is doing so…
[edited for length by n-n]
Neo,
I disagree with your contention that “strong resolve” was needed for Obama to not bungle the SOFA negotiation. At that point, it was clearly evident that Iraq was settling down in a familiar pattern for overseas US military deployment. The Marines were even agitating to leave Iraq for Afghanistan because Iraq had turned into the kind of long-term partnership traditionally performed by the Army.
Certainly, historically strong presidential resolve was demonstrated by Bush for the COIN “surge” in 2006. By 2010, though, staying the course in Iraq would have required some resolve to negotiate a new SOFA, but not substantially different than the resolve in SOFA negotiations for other, older overseas military partnerships. What was abnormal with Iraq was the bungling of the SOFA negotiation.
At the point we left, just as much or more resolve was needed to bungle the SOFA negotiation and reverse course than the resolved that was needed to continue following what was fast transforming into a conventional, normalized course with Iraq.
Eric:
As I said, we basically agree. I think at this point we’re arguing about semantics. I say “strong” resolve because the American public was somewhat against it. I don’t mean resolve as strong as Bush needed and Bush demonstrated.
And yes, strong resolve was needed to leave, too. But that was the resolve that Obama had in abundance. He didn’t have the resolve to stay.
the MSM and the Democrats had worked on the public re Iraq for many years, and had turned a lot of people against it (more and more over time), as had the fact that the peace-making was more difficult and costly than many people had expected
read what you said a few times…
then remember that what that says has little to do with the actuality of the public outside… the left says that people dont want guns… hows that in reality? they said people didnt want the war and all that, but thats not true either.
ie. sort out whether your pravda is itsvetsia or your itsvetsia is pravda… (your truth is news or your news is the truth)
what molded the vocal to be X could mold them to be Y
you have not tried to understand the subject as they are… you can see the hints of it in what you say… ie. you refer to him in ways that dont fit.
its like when you are studying science, and they start telling you about gravity… but their illustrations break other science as its not the subject.
so you may seen balles that are suns and see a tiny red one, a blue one, and so on… there are red dwarves and there are blue stars… but then you come across the purple one… since the star color was not the point of the lesson, this error is ignored.
but what we are then used to is never having a correct whole, but only correct parts…
this makes it very hard for you to ‘get’ what is going on… it also keeps you from applying it to the past they are copying… and so on and so on.
for the outcome to be correct the whole of the nput has to be correct…
a stopped clock may be right twice a day, but a slow one wont be right for years and years and years…
The weapons sold to AQ in Libya and SYria, as well as the additional training and morale boost that came from defeating Libya’s dictator, naturally and logickally lead to AQ’s success in Iraq.
The Republicans and so called independents that supported Hussein, sold their souls to become enemies of America, enemies of Iraqis, and soon to be enemies of humanity.
They believe they will be spared in the coming holocaust, or merely that they will be the last to pay the price.
Neo,
What you observed in 2005 is a main reason I’m so adamant about the need for Right activism. I didn’t exist yet during the Vietnam War, but starting from 9/11, we saw the updated model of Left activism in action, even transforming victory into defeat in Iraq. We can’t say the Left activists of the Vietnam War achieved that much.
I wrote this on my blog in September, 2005:
Kris of “Reflections of a Libertarian Republican” is one of the few who see the threat that I see. He reacts to the Sept 24 anti-American rallies in his blogpost Anti-War Rally in D.C.: Speakers Label Bush “War Criminal”; Call for Impeachment:
Also read Christopher Hitchens’ article: Anti-War, My Foot.
For a democratic society, the Narrative is immensely important in shaping collective action and promoting the collective will. The anti-American propaganda and psy-ops machine scares me – more so when the voice of support, the ‘Why We Fight’ message, is deafeningly silent in America. Since September 18, 2001, the day I attended the ISO meeting in Hamilton Hall that proclaimed 9/11 as their opportunity to resume the anti-American “revolution”, I’ve been scared. . . . These days, every qualified source of pro-mission support on campus stays quiet to avoid the pain of squaring off against the well-financed, unscrupulous, unregulated and aggressive pitbull guard dogs of the ISO.
The trend seems to be for the majority of mission supporters, both the ones I know personally and the ones I read on the blogosphere, to attempt to dismiss or minimalize the anti-American entities who are operating openly and professionally within our country and on the global market. Is that by strategy or are their heads buried in the sand? It would be nice to believe it’s strategy, but I go with the latter. It seems almost to be a wilful denial of events. . . . It draws from the same boxed-in mentality that even today, after all we’ve been through together, dismisses the ISO and fails to recognize their global threat, strategy and mission. Worst of all, despite my prodding, they seem to have abdicated their place – their voice – as campus entities to project support for our nation’s missions and our champions. Unlike my side, the ISO truly understands what it means to “think globally and act locally”. Their pro-defeat Narrative has spread far more pervasively in our society than most on my side will admit.
. . .
Is this blogpost an overdose of angst and an inability to see the forest for the trees? Maybe, but from where I sit . . ., I feel an awful lot like I’ve lost my personal battle to reform the hearts and minds of my generation and to steel my people against a passionate, cunning and hungry enemy. I tried and I just wasn’t good enough.
Eric:
I feel likewise as though I have watched a slow-motion tragedy unfolding, one I’ve seen before. Early in the life of this blog I wrote a lot about Iraq, and I was worried the whole time about this happening. I saw what the left was doing from the start, and I feel as though I’ve had my finger in the dike the whole time, fruitlessly.
You and I are just two people. The fight is much bigger than that. It will take a great deal more than you or me. We do what we can, and others have to do what they can. It’s a long, long game, and these are very dark times.
We can’t say the Left activists of the Vietnam War achieved that much.
Sure we can. The Tet Offensive broke the back of the Vietcong, destroying even their cadre in the South of V. After that, they had to reform their army, the NVA, into a Soviet backed one, and that took a few years.
The Left, by destroying American morale with the coverage of the Tet Offensive, turned the defeat of North Vietnam into a victory.
Ymarsakar: “The weapons sold to AQ in Libya and SYria, as well as the additional training and morale boost that came from defeating Libya’s dictator, naturally and logickally lead to AQ’s success in Iraq.”
The popular Narrative is that Obama has kept us out of Syria and limited our involvement in Libya. However, pundits willfully overlook that we have intervened in those places, and the combination of ways we’ve intervened and pulled away have resulted in the effects you state.
I wouldn’t have predicted what I did, if I thought single individuals could make much impact strategically. That wasn’t how my calculations ended up.
It will take around 12-14 years more just for the stars to align correctly. It is true that Americans refused to fight when it is easy, so they will be forced to fight when the costs are extreme.
Call it fate, for a nation’s fate is not determined by one or two people.
The popular Narrative is that Obama has kept us out of Syria and limited our involvement in Libya.
So long as American patriots allow their friends, family, and associates to say such things without driving a steel pin through the eyes of the enemy, people will continue to believe in popularity and narratives.
But while psychological and social pressure is useful at many times in time, the power of Death exceeds any and all mortal forces. To unlock the power of Death, however, requires personal changes, not world changes.
Ymarsakar,
I’ll modify with we were winning in Vietnam, but had not yet won. We had won in Iraq.
My response to this whole mess is unprintable.
Awful. Just awful. I think Obama may be starting to make Carter look good.
colagirl:
Obama started to make Carter look good a long, long time ago.
There is really no comparison. Carter was not out to destroy the country. Carter was not malevolent, and he wasn’t basically a liar. He did not misrepresent himself. He was neither Orwellian nor an Alinskyite.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
Before the election of 2008, I remember trying to tell a couple of friends who were liberals, but more middle-of-the-road types, that the prospect of an Obama presidency frightened me, and why. They looked at me blankly; I could not get my points across to them. The last time I asked any of them what they think now was a year or two ago. I suspect they’re not all that happy but not all that unhappy either and are not following things very closely.
Neo,
As I’ve said here before, the Iraq mission is patient zero. In terms of form, law, and policy at least, OIF was invested with everything essential of robust US liberal hegemonic leadership of the free world.
When the Iraq mission was discredited in the zeitgeist, US leadership as a whole was discredited, with the consequential fall-out. When I call for setting the record straight on the Iraq mission, it’s with the perspective that doing so is necessary as the linchpin to re-right US foreign policy as a whole.
That’s a coincidence – I use the finger in the dike metaphor to describe my discouragement, too. This excerpt is from the 2nd part of my January post that I excerpted upthread, plus the same metaphor from a 2012 post:
Code of Conduct:
I am an American, fighting in the forces which guard my country and our way of life.
Soldier’s Creed:
I am a guardian of freedom and the American way of life.
Civilization oriented by a robust, sure American liberal exceptionalism, made real to me by my service in Korea, was for me synonymous with the “American way of life”.
As I walked the city while the sun set on 9/11, I anticipated the anti-liberal flood in the coming contest and determined to fight it as a college activist. I’m the boy who stuck his finger into a trickling leak to try saving his hometown. . . . but I didn’t make the larger social-political difference that was most important. The anti-liberal tsunami broke through and washed over and around the crumbling dike/levee I meant to guard, undeterred by the few sandbags I managed to pile. Worse, the anti-liberal flood burst from inside my hometown, from American leaders, as well as from outside, from America’s competitors.
Failure teaches. . . . It’s time to fall back to the redoubt and rethink the situation. What I thought we needed on 9/11 is insufficient; the social pathology infecting America is something more fundamental. Civil-military integration is closer to the issue than American liberal hegemonic order, but more digging for the cure is needed.
—-
My failure to make a difference after 9/11 fuels my impulse to turn away . . . I feel like the boy hero of the fable of the Dutch boy who stuck his finger into a leak in a dike, stayed there faithfully through the cold night, stopped the leak from growing into a destructive flood, thus saving his home. Except my heroic finger didn’t slow the leak in the slightest. Instead, the dike has crumbled around my finger while many other large leaks have sprung. The dike is collapsing, the flood is growing, and I wonder what further point there is for me to keep sticking my fingers into holes that are larger than I am.
Eric:
People have stuck it through in much more difficult circumstances than this.
However, I think the problem is partly in human nature. Leftism appeals to certain things in human nature, and leftsits also use techniques that appeal to certain powerful aspects of human nature. It helps, also, if you’re willing to do or say anything to achieve your cause. Moral people are somewhat handicapped in that regard.
It has to do with a much more basic belief system: will evil triumph over good? It’s an age-old question.
Once your change your priority, Eric, from changing the world to changing yourself, your perspective should also change as well.
Trust in steel and your own soul/body. Humanity is not something one can place faith in, or hope in that such will change the world.
http://www.chenessinc.com/9260.htm
Only the upper 25% of humanity are worth much in chaotic times (or in battles), and only 3% of the human population is competent at leadership or out of the box thinking.
Iraq is descending into Realpolitik, though the ISIS players are rotten.
During Gulf War I I questioned why GHW Bush would not consider letting Iraq, a West-created pseudonation, divide into three natural parts which would check and balance each other. The Shia would get the rivers’ deltas and the oil there; the Sunni would get Sunni Iraq, the western desert, with Baghdad and no oil; and the Kurds would get North Iraq (as they indeed have done). This is now more or less happening. ISIS gets NW Iraq; the Kurds are armed and hostile to the ISIS fanatics, and no one in Iraq is messing with the Shia in SE Iraq, not since the fall of Saddam. Of course the Shia must not fall into the hands of the Persians.
It would have saved a lot of trouble. Realpolitik has a place, despite the ill-advised Geo W idealism, the GOP’s own hope and change.
Ymarsakar –
You remind me of famous quote:
“Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.” Heraclitus
Lurker, yea I also remembered that line. Battle specializations are rarer, but for our time we can include political and economic fields too. That increases the kind of people that qualify, but only by a little.
Leaders of armies are expected to make use of everyone in humanity, even if the private is only useful for cleaning latrines and digging fox holes. But modern Leftists think they are too smart a cannonfodder for that kind of menial work, they want something called “minimum wage”.
Slightly off subject. I think we can all agree that the Gitmo 5 will be probably be out of Qatar within the next 30 days (why should they waste a year just because of a silly agreement with a stooge-state like the US,). The question that interests me is whether they will return to Afghanistan or try and find self-fulfillment with al-Qaeda in Iraq?
So when is Chelsea or Hussein’s two daughters going to war to fight AQ and the Taliban, both organizations their parents helped fund, train, or defend?
Remember that line they used on us?
Snopes verified these quotations from The Precious. Note, especially, the last.
From Dreams of My Father: ‘I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites.’
From Dreams of My Father: ‘I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother’s race.’
From Dreams of My Father: ‘It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.’
From Dreams of My Father: ‘I never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.’
From Audacity of Hope: ‘I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.’
More on point: Walid Shoebat, former PLO terrorist and Christian convert, said that he finds it amazing that we Westerners refuse to admit that Comrade Zero is a muslim. ‘Of course he is,” Shoebat exclaimed; we all know he is.”
Ymarsakar: “Once your change your priority, Eric, from changing the world to changing yourself, your perspective should also change as well.”
True, but the old loyalties still have a grip.
Setting the record straight on the Iraq mission in the popular narrative is critical for restoring the premises of American leadership in the zeitgeist.
But there’s a more personal reason that recalls this scene from WW2 coming home movie classic Best Years of Our Lives:
http://youtu.be/5-k2wdwxvSI
Homer and Fred, WW2 vets, encounter an ‘America First’ isolationist whose anti-war views are precedent for current-day libertarian opposition to the Iraq mission and War on Terror generally.
A lot of people from the Left and Right loudly proclaim the Iraq mission to be illegal, unjustified, and dishonorable – from foolish to downright fraudulent. Yet I know the Iraq mission was as legal, justified, and honorable as any in modern US history. A lot of our troops died over there, or came home scarred physically and/or psychologically, some severely so. Our living troops, and parents, siblings, widows, widowers, and children of our honored dead deserve to know the selfless service and sacrifice was for something worthwhile and to be recognized in the zeitgeist as such. That reason alone is enough to set the record the straight on the Iraq mission.
Don Carlos,
The outside interference by ISIS isn’t any more realpolitik than our intervention or Iranian interference. It’s telling that to stoke the sectarian tensions in Iraq to a civil war level has required outside input, such as with the Iranian-sponsored Sadrists and AQI, now ISIS.
There isn’t a consensus that Iraqi nationalism is a dead end. At least the few Iraqis I’ve discussed the issue with don’t believe in partitioning Iraq.
Here’s a good in-depth discussion of the issue among (apparently) Iraqis and Iraq scholars:
http://gulfanalysis.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/operation-iraqi-partition/
Generally, they’re against partitioning Iraq, but the issue is complicated.
A lot of people from the Left and Right loudly proclaim the Iraq mission to be illegal, unjustified, and dishonorable — from foolish to downright fraudulent.
Treason is the more appropriate label for such, and in time they will be forced to make a decision one way or another.
A lot of external enemies like dividing up a nation, the same was true for British support for the Confeds.
You trade some temporary friction now, for eternal enmity later.
I remember the helicopters… I was a kid, but I remember them. And growing up post-Vietnam, I was fed the b******t that what happened was inevitable, that the South was going to lose no matter what, that Tet Offensive was a US/SVN defeat, that the people of Vietnam WANTED a North victory, etc., etc., etc., It was when I was really an adult, post-college, that I learned that it was all lies. (Though the number of Vietnamese who risked their lives to escape via boat should’ve clued me in a lot sooner.)
And since going into Afghanistan and into Iraq, I have figured that the Left was going to do everything within their power to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And lo! My guess is it will take just about as long is it did Vietnam (from the Tet Offensive in 1968 to the union of the South and North in 1976–eight years.) So by the end of Obama’s second term, expect total loss in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It is beyond my comprehension how people can have so little compassion for others. Because this overwhelming need/desire for the left to see America lose is at the cost of the lives of others. No one else matters to them–only the party line…
Supporting or not an American war is an individual’s conscience and decision. But obeying the Left’s propaganda and helping them destroy the nation, that is where the line of treason is drawn. The hypocrisy that they use as a shield to justify their crimes against humanity, doesn’t smell much better. They think they are the humanitarian, freedom loving, freedom fighter supporting crowd, as they toast the Fall of Saigon and talk about Afghanistan being the “good war” while doing everything they can to kill and cripple US forces in Iraq, which were needed for Afghanistan too.
I target an enemy’s will to fight, as per Sun Tzu’s guidelines. Once an enemy’s belief in their cause or their authority is destroyed, you can make them believe what you want them to believe.
But first, the Left must be destroyed, by any available method. Then people will come to see the truth, freed of the Veil of Illusion.
Attempting to “convince” people before the war is over, that their side is wrong, is trying to change the world. And unless you have supreme social pressure, military or economic levers, or slave master powers, people won’t be so easy to change externally.
Beverly:
Those Obama quotes are bogus.
Ymarsakar: “A lot of external enemies like dividing up a nation, the same was true for British support for the Confeds.”
Internal enemies, too.
I don’t think he is necessarily Muslim but I think he sympathizes with them over other religions- witness the Cairo speech and his lack of attention to Christians by Muslims persecuted in the Middle East and Africa. Part of that is his identification with his deadbeat father, and part of it is the Western guilt and idealization of “Third World” cultures that characterizes so much left-wing thinking.
Speaking of which, someone needs to put on blast what is happening to the Christians of Mosul and Nineveh Plain. Some of the oldest Christian communities, churches, and monasteries are in the hands of madmen who literally crucify Christians, and Western Christians are mostly silent.
NEOLeftism appeals to certain things in human nature, and leftsits also use techniques that appeal to certain powerful aspects of human nature.
while at the same time denying that you HAVE a nature, and so, you would never seek to learn the techniques and things that they are using on you…
ie. i must not have a nature, so they have nothing to exploit, and so there is nothing to block or stop
You haven’t learned the technique of capitalizing English sentences yet, Art, but you have read a lot of capitalized English sentences in your life time.
What gives you the authority to tell us what nature we have or don’t have?