Commentary on the economic , geopolitical and simply fascinating things going on. Served occasionally with a side of snark.
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Iraq and Syria Wars blurring together ( August 10 , 2014 ) -SPECIAL Update Sunday Agust 10 , 2014 - Has Maliki launched a coup ? ( check various updates at tweets section ! ) As the US joins in the ongoing Iraq sectarian War , at what point does it reluctantly start attacking IS in Syria as well ? Most recent news by way of tweets ( conflicting items regarding current PM Malik - might have been replaced by Tarek Najim , might still be negotiating his departure . )
When President Obama announced US airstrikes in Iraq, most observers understood that the US would be bombing members of ISIS. What many did not know was that, in a twist of such bitterly symbolic irony that it could only occur in the Middle East, the US would also be bombing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of American military equipment.
Here's why: in the decade since the 2003 US-led Iraq invasion, the US has spent a fortune training and arming the Iraqi army in the hopes of readying it to secure the country once America left. That meant arming the Iraqi army with high-tech and extremely expensive American-made guns, tanks, jeeps, artillery, and more.
WE'RE BOMBING THE GUNS THAT WE DIDN'T MEAN TO GIVE ISIS BECAUSE WE DIDN'T GIVE GUNS TO THEIR ENEMIES BECAUSE THEN ISIS MIGHT GET GUNS
But the Iraqi army has been largely a failure. When ISIS invaded northern Iraq from Syria in June, the Iraqi forces deserted or retreated en masse. Many of them abandoned their American equipment. ISIS scooped it up themselves and are now using it to rampage across Iraq, seizing whole cities, terrorizing minorities, and finally pushing into even once-secure Kurdish territory. All with shiny American military equipment.
So the US air strikes against ISIS are in part to destroy US military equipment, such as the artillery ISIS has been using against Kurdish forces.
The absurdity runs deep: America is using American military equipment to bomb other pieces of American military equipment halfway around the world. The reason the American military equipment got there in the first place was because, in 2003, the US had to use its military to rebuild the Iraqi army, which it just finished destroying with the American military. The American weapons the US gave the Iraqi army totally failed at making Iraq secure and have become tools of terror used by an offshoot of al-Qaeda to terrorize the Iraqis that the US supposedly liberated a decade ago. And so now the US has to use American weaponry to destroy the American weaponry it gave Iraqis to make Iraqis safer, in order to make Iraqis safer.
It keeps going: the US is intervening on behalf of Iraqi Kurds, our ally, because their military has old Russian-made weapons, whereas ISIS, which is America's enemy, has higher-quality American weapons. "[Kurdish forces] are literally outgunned by an ISIS that is fighting with hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. military equipment seized from the Iraqi Army who abandoned it," Ali Khedery, a former American official in Iraq, told the New York Times.
More: One reason that ISIS has been so successful at conquering northern Iraq is that it has a huge base of operations in Syria, where it had exploited the civil war to overtake huge swathes of Syrian territory. One reason that ISIS was so successful in Syria is that the US refused to arm moderate Syrian rebels, for fear that the weapons would fall into ISIS's hands. So that made it easier for ISIS to overpower the under-funded moderate rebels, and now ISIS has seized, in Iraq, much better versions of the weapons that we were so worried they might acquire in Syria. So now we're bombing the guns that we didn't mean to give ISIS because we didn't give guns to their enemies because then ISIS might get guns.
BAGHDAD: Iraq's parliament on Sunday adjourned until August 19 with lawmakers unable to agree on a nominee for the post of prime minister despite ever-growing international pressure, several MPs said.
"There can be no explanation for this delay," said Ammar Toma, a Shiite MP from the Fadhilah party. "There are important matters on the table: the fate of the displaced, the security situation."
US President Barack Obama, UN chief Ban Ki-moon and visiting French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius have, over the past two days alone, stressed that Iraq needed a new and united government to lead the fight against jihadists who control large parts of the country.
Many blame the crisis on Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, whose policies critics say marginalised Sunni Arabs, pushing them into the arms of jihadists.
Despite winning April polls comfortably, the deadly two-month-old conflict has made his position untenable.
Maliki has lost the support of many former allies, including Washington, Tehran, Iraq's influential Shiite religious leadership and a significant part of his own Dawa party.
But the 64-year-old has dug his heels in and Iraq's fractious parliament has so far been unable to agree on an alternative.
( Regrets leaving Libya so soon , Iraq a " long term project " now - apparently without a timeframe and ever expanding so called redlines , leaving Iraq not his idea ( except during his 2012 Re-Election campaign ) , boy he rolled some whoppers out there ! )
Since his Thursday night announcement that he had authorized US airstrikes in Iraq, the US air war in the country has picked up considerably, and President Obama’s latest comments are laying the stage for a “long-term project” in the country, with further escalations likely along the way.
In his interview with the New York Times, President Obama lamented the comparative brevity of his war in Libya, saying his decision to attack Libya and impose regime change was “the right thing,” but that the US should’ve had a longer “follow-up” mission to prop up a new government there.
It is that regret that is informing his new Iraq War, and his talk of a military goal of preventing the creation of an Islamic caliphate in Iraq and Syria is only part of a protracted nation-building mission that is rapidly forming around what he presented Thursday as an emergency humanitarian intervention. Obama was quick to dismiss any talk of any time frame for the new war, saying only that it “is going to take some time,” and answering a question about whether that meant months or years by saying only that it wouldn’t be a matter of weeks.
Yesterday’s expansion of the “red lines” inside Iraq to include ISIS getting near either Irbil or Baghdad were also expanded further today, with Obama saying a key portion of the war now was also meant to prevent ISIS from getting ahold of “key infrastructure” all across Iraq.
The political goals of the war were also laid bare today, with Obama promising to see Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority feeling “connected to and well-served by a national government” in the long term.”
Another telling aspect of the president’s latest talk is that, while he had long bragged about having ‘gotten the US out of Iraq,’ he openly spurned the label today, insisting the pullout was “not my decision” and was only done because President Bush had reached a status of forces agreement which expired under his watch.
Ultimately, the new Iraq War is shaping up to be even more ambitious than the 2003 mis-adventure, with President Obama imagining not only the ouster of ISIS from the nation’s west and from Syria’s east, but also the creation of a new, more “inclusive” Iraqi government.
ISIS fighters took to Twitter with glee over the weekend to celebrate the Obama Administration’s decision to join the war against them in Iraq, seeing it as both a big morale booster and a potentially huge recruitment tool.
“The crisis will become a gift,” noted one, saying that the US was ISIS biggest enemy, and that US involvement would quicken their takeover of the Persian Gulf.
Many of the Twitter posts expressed eagerness to target US warplanes now involved in the war, as well as hopes to attack other US allies across the region.
ISIS already had a bumper crop of Westerners join the war in Syria over the past couple of years, with large numbers of fighters coming from EU member nations. The early signs are that the US involvement will only help bolster those numbers further.
That may be particularly true of Americans, as a comparatively small number of US fighters have actually joined ISIS, as opposed to the influx of fighters from nations like France and Germany. ISIS leaders seem to understand much better than the Obama Administration that the US involvement in the war is a game-changer on the ground, and not the good kind like you’d want.
ISIS got its first start as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and its early growth was almost entirely a function of the US occupation of Iraq. The group began shrinking after the US pullout, and only started regrowing when they transitioned into Syria.
With the Syria War still giving ISIS a huge amount of recruitment potential and the takeover of broad swathes of both Iraq and Syria giving them unrivaled credibility, the return of the US military is throwing yet more gasoline on the already raging fire.
At least 151 people were killed and 60 were wounded, as U.S. airstrikes continued. Most of the dead were militants. Several bombs wounded a number of civilians.
Politics:
U.S. President Barack Obamasaid that airstrikes have already accomplished their job at stunting the Islamic State’s advance towards Kurdistan. Humanitarian airdrops will continue, but the president called helping Iraq "a long-term project." Repeated airstrikes may be necessary for several months, he admitted. Analysts are more critical of the airstrikes, though, and they believe the operation lacks a real strategy.
According to the International Organization for Migration, over one million Iraqis are now internally displaced from their homes. Over 50 percent of them left their homes since the June invasion of the Islamic State.
In an extraordinary move, Baghdadsentto Arbil a C-140 full of small arms ammunition for use by Peshmerga forces. Baghdad and the United States have kept the Kurds in a weakened position to ensure that Iraq stays united. The rapid advance by the Islamic State has made that rigid stance unsustainable.
Fighting:
U.S. warplanes conducted at least four airstrikes near Sinjar today after observing militants firing indiscriminately at Yazidis. Meanwhile, militants began to regroup at locations bombed yesterday. Outside of Kalak, at least 13 militants were killed in a strike.
Militants kidnapped 150 families, mostly women and children, trying to reach Sinjar Mountain.
In his interview with the New York Times, President Obama lamented the comparative brevity of his war in Libya, saying his decision to attack Libya and impose regime change was “the right thing,” but that the US should’ve had a longer “follow-up” mission to prop up a new government there.
DAILY SABAH World 
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