STOCKMAN: “NOW COME THE FURIES”
Fire from the sky. Shock and awe. Coalitions of the willing …
They’re back like cooked crack in Iraq – where the United States is now dropping bombs on “terrorists” affiliated with the al-Qaeda-led Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Despite receiving no authorization from Congress and in the face of overwhelming public opposition to military involvement in Iraq, U.S. president Barack Obama has nonetheless launched airstrikes in the northern part of the country.
Why? The excuses vary. The initial airstrikes were said to be aimed at preventing a “humanitarian catastrophe” involving refugees fleeing ISIS – but late Friday the tune changed when Washington announced a fresh round of drone and fighter strikes.
This time the warmongers claimed they were merely acting to protect American diplomats.
“There are American military and diplomatic personnel in Irbil,” a White House spokesman said. “The protection of American personnel in Iraq is a top priority and one that merits the use of military force.”
Wait … “top priority?”
Imagine that … (ahem, Benghazi).
Anyway, David Stockman over at the website Contra Corner has penned probably the best column we’ve read yet regarding the United States “third crusade” in Iraq.
According to Stockman, “the ISIS terrorists are winning against the hapless Iraqi military and even the formidable Kurdish peshmerga fighters – using some of the most lethal arms that the US military-industrial complex could concoct.”
Wait … how’d they get these weapons? Easy: America is backing ISIS in Syria. Oh, and there’s a ton of military hardware that didn’t leave Iraq when our troops did in December 2011 following an eight-year slog – one that accomplished absolutely nothing but flushing several trillion dollars down the drain and putting several thousand brave American soldiers six feet under.
Well, something was accomplished … but it sure as hell wasn’t the American mission of establishing a secure supply of oil and installing a loyal puppet government willing to stand up to Iran.
“What these fools did was to open the gates of hell,” Stockman continues. “The end result of Washington’s 20-year campaign to liberate Iraq, beginning with the first gulf war and followed by the devastating trade sanctions of the 1990s and the brutal desecrations of Bush II’s ‘shock and awe’ and all the military mayhem which followed, was to aggravate, widen and mobilize all of the latent ethnic and religious conflicts and enmities that had been bottled up for decades inside the Sykes-Picot illusion.”
What’s Sykes-Picot? Those would be the artificial boundaries created in 1916 by the British and French – lines which bore absolutely no relation to the ethnic groups living on the ground.
“It was their successors in the west which installed a series of corrupt and brutal rulers, including kings, generals and Saddam Hussein himself, who maintained an always tentative and frequently blood-soaked semblance of governance within these artificial borders,” Stockman adds.
ISIS is exploding these imperial boundaries – and they’re doing it using weapons (and in some cases the CIA training) American taxpayers provided them. But now America’s leaders need to save face following the abject failure of their “dumb war” (Obama’s words) … and so they’re bombing ISIS?
Yup …
Such is the utter ridiculousness of American foreign policy – which forces taxpayers who are already in the hole nearly $18 trillion to subsidize both sides of a conflict that only serves to stoke anti-American passions, making us less safe as a county.
As we noted in a recent piece, America’s war gods are “like dementia sufferers … except with a limitless expense account and absolutely no accountability.”
On that count, warmongering U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (RINO-S.C.) is correct – the seeds of the next September 11, 2001 attack are being sown in Iraq.
It’s our brain dead leaders sowing them …
Enough is enough. We cannot continue to flush money we don’t have on interventions that – at best – serve no purpose.
Armed neutrality. Free trade. The avoidance of entanglements … these should be the watchwords of U.S. foreign policy. Unfortunately, very few “Republicans” and Democrats in Washington, D.C. understand that.
34 comments
Liberals are always starting wars in the Middle East, aren’t they? They sure screwed up with that whole Iraq tried to kill my daddy thing… and then mixed in that “protect our oil” thing.
No worries. muslim Obama and ISIS are now in charge in the middle east. That was the plan all along. Just ask Egypt.
Yes and now to install Tom Ewin as Governor and our evil plan will be finished!
Muslim Obama is in charge! Yay! So we don’t need to send planes to blow up ISIS people, right?
Oh, wait.
Idiot, you just don’t get it. muslim Obama is just trying to cover his ass in regards to the 40,000 Christians and possible genocide on the mountain.
So far he has dropped 11 pallets of food and water , several of which ISIS has apparently gotten.
It appears he has dropped a couple of bombs on a Toyota pick-up truck.
He ain’t gonna bother ISIS.Proof of that are the 150,000 deaths in Syria. If it weren’t for the November elections the SOB would allow all those Christians in Iraq to starve to to death or be slaughtered.
It will be interesting to see which terrorist org. Obummer leads after he leaves the White House, if he indeed dose leave. If it weren’t and election year those Christians would be merely collateral damage.
Yes sir. Have a great weekend Rouge and God Bless. I feel I can take the weekend off now that we are sending Obama on another vacation. :-)
You guys are scared, little idiots.
The Iraq issues certainly need to be debated, but putting “terrorists” in quotation marks when talking about members of the Islamic State militia just makes you look stupid (unlike the “Republican” quotation marks which have become a staple on this site, which at least have some satirical/sarcastic value). There is no debate (outside of al Qaeda or IS itself) that the murderous, backwards, and bloodthirsty clowns in IS are using terror as a weapon toward a political end and are, therefore, terrorists (without the quotation marks).
The Iraq issues certainly need to be debated
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Think we’ll get around to it while Cheney is still alive?
When you guys gonna let Bush and Cheney out of your heads? We’ve screwed up plenty since 2001-2009.
When they are perp-walked through the Hague for war crimes.
C’mon man…you’re better than that. Don’t obsess.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWkwHo18f3I
They are out of my head, just not my pocketbook. Trillions more will be spent in Iraq. SC is no different, Millions more for Nikki’s blunders are ahead.
The Point “Mike” is that these folks were armed and trained by our own “intelligence” agencies. Therefore, if we are to label them, we had better be sure the label doesn’t equally apply to our own folks. “”””””
Undoubtedly, what they are doing is heinous. How were they alowed to get to this point? Who put them on the world’s stage? You can’t fund both sides of a war and then cast aspersion on an enemy based on qualities you represent.
Don’t get all lathered about semantics. Open your “eyes”.
That may be your point, which is fine. My point, however, remains the one I actually made. These people are terrorists, period. There is no debate on that point among rational observers. The quotation marks around the term are silly, and make a writer appear biased to the point of near irrelevance. To your (new) point, however, American actions have certainly contributed to the problems in that region for decades, but they are not causal. While blaming the US for the relative success of IS is a simplistic view that doesn’t stand scrutiny, it is at least debatable. Whether or not the IS buffoons are terrorists, however, is not.
I have a “lathered” face, but this isn’t it. This is my grown up, spent 20 years studying these clowns, lived-in-their-sandbox-for-years face. My original point stands- no quotation marks needed.
I’m pretty sure FITS cares less about appearance and more about provoking thought and conversation that would hopefully lead to an end of our decades-long intervention of the region.
Sure, they’re terrorists. But shouldn’t we stop funding them before we decide to kill them? If the answer is not an emphatic yes, then we’re doomed to fight a war that will end only when we go bankrupt (which was bin Laden’s strategy from the beginning).
We’re not funding IS. They’re so fucked up even AQ dumped them, for crying out loud. Did you catch that? They are too religiously extreme for al-fucking-Qaeda! There is a very small amount of cross-pollination with a handful of the fighters we may have been assisting in the fight against Assad, but nothing of consequence. These guys are simply Islamic Jihadist terrorist nutjobs (who we’re not funding or helping in any way). Not sexy or fun, but true.
I agree it does need to be debated.
Ultimately,though ,I think its comes down to an overriding question,
Are the American people prepared for an UNLIMITED commitment ,involving THOUSANDS of American troops in probably a PERMANENT Occupation force stationed in Iraq and the BILLIONS of dollars that will cost?
Let the debate begin!
Maybe 100 years — McCain
No long-term occupation required (the successes enjoyed by IS stem from the lack of resistance to a relatively weak military footprint, and air power could stop that in a week). Besides, Iraq has probably disintegrated to the point that there won’t be an Iraq (as it was known for the past 50-60 years, anyway) to occupy. It could very well self-Balkanize over the next year or two (assuming Islamists don’t take over and rule as a theocracy).
Should we qualify Israel’s attempts to terrorize the citizens of Gaza into rejecting their elected government as “state terrorism” or leave it simply as “terrorism?”
(The quotation marks here merely in the convention to identify words as simply words.)
I gotcha on your use of the quotations, but to call Israel a “terrorist state” because it opposes Hamas’ influence in Gaza is beyond even MSNBC-level weird. Hamas’ primary stated purpose is the destruction of Israel, in case you missed that. Sorry, but I just can’t debate silliness; busy week.
Anyway, David Stockman over at the website Contra Corner has penned probably the best column we’ve read yet regarding the United States “third crusade” in Iraq.
Wait! You mean Tango didn’t pen the best column on this issue…?
This is what Nobel Peace Prize winners do
I’m sorry but we MUST help the Kurds. They were left to defend themselves by the Maliki government. As far as the rest of Iraq, they can go kill each other all they want.
We DO have a responsibility to the Kurds.
Bush backstabbed the Marsh Arabs, as some have noted. How could anyone trust us again if we abandon the Iraqi Kurds to annihilation?
They need to partition the country into three parts like Biden suggested years ago. Sure, Biden was probably drunk when he said it, but it’s still the right idea.
Even a blind squirrel…
I’ve spent three long years stomping around that freaking part of the world and I’ve come to a conclusion – let’s just bring everybody (and as much of our stuff as we can) home, then forbid the press from covering any events and just let’em kill each other with impunity. Once they’re all done killing each other we can just move in and take the oil with no muss or fuss – there isn’t a single thing in that part of the world worth the trouble we’ve gotten embroiled in and in reality we have access to plenty of oil on our own.
Same thing Clinton did. And we got 9-11ed for it…
“Mission Accomplished”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/
Thank you, W., Paul Wolfowitz, and Dick Cheney.
Is this the same “David Stockman” who was Reagan’s budget guy, sold Trickle Down all over TV and the Congress only to admit after he left office that tickle down was a monumental con game; the same David Stockman who wrote a book in 2012 where he revealed the total moral bankruptcy and economic scam of private equity and used Mitt Romney and Bain Capital as his examples?
If so, when did David Stockman ever have time to learn about foreign affairs?