Iraq redux

[Pointedstick]

If they asked for help, I have no problem with helping them as long as it does not become another open-ended conflict and we don't give them weapons and technology that they will later surrender when they flee before their enemies. It also helps that this time, the enemy really is frightening and threatening.

[annieB]

What a muck up.

Must be Putin's fault...

[dualstow]

Some food and water got to the Yazidis, and that's a good thing.

[clacy]

No one wants to go back into Iraq in any serious way, but I do think we need to stop ISIS.

Air strikes (with laser spotters on the ground), drones and arm the Kurds heavily. 

[Reub]

I applaud any attack on Islamist murderers anywhere at anytime whether it be in Gaza, Iraq, or Jersey City.

But let's remember that this President abandoned Iraq and opened the door wide open for these terrorists to commit mass murder and worse. Can Afghanistan be far behind?

[Pointedstick]

One of the biggest tragedies of the Iraq war was how we demolished a stabilizing influence in the region: Saddam Hussein's non-religious, anti-islamist strongman dictatorship. By taking him out and removing Iraq as a major power, we created a power vacuum that enabled an unchecked Iran to rise in stature and importance and resulted in a perfect training ground for militants and warlords eager to hone their skills against Americans and capture some heavy weapons. So I'm very sensitive to both the dangers of foreign interventionism as well as our own recent history in this very country!

But I still think there's a fundamental difference between invading a country and replacing its powerful but non-threatening government with a weak and pathetic one, and answering a call for help by people who are being massacred by those who openly state their desire to kill us all. Nobody's upset if we help out the Kurds and Iraqi civilians against the IS butchers who wipe out whole villages and publicly display severed heads as warnings.

In case you think that's an exaggeration or uncorroborated neocon bluster, I urge you to check this out: https://news.vice.com/video/the-islamic-state-part-1

As usual, Vice produces some amazing journalism of the kind that most mainstream reporters appear to timid to do.

[Ad Orientem]

Normally I would be extremely hostile to all of this. But with massive reluctance I think we have to step in here for two reason.

1. If you break it, you bought it. And yes, we broke Iraq. George Bush went into that country and removed an admittedly brutal government , but that government was the only thing holding Iraq together. That of course is because Iraq is a geo-political fantasy. It is an arbitrary creation of the Western powers who randomly drew a bunch of lines after world War II and said "these are countries." Never mind the fact that in many of these new countries you had multiple different religious and racial groups who have hated each other for centuries. Then along comes the Texas cowboy thinking he will remove the bad guy running the show and all of these religious groups that have hated each other for a thousand years would suddenly start singing kumbaya and agree to live in peaceful coexistence within an enlightened liberal democracy. Bush I can excuse on grounds of mental incompetence. But Dick Cheney belongs in either prison or an asylum for the criminally insane. Unfortunately we elected them, and now we own their mess.

2. Setting aside the above, even my very strong non-interventionist tendencies have limits. I don't think we can stand aside and watch this kind of off the scale atrocities without stepping in, for the same reason (I hope) we would not allow someone to run around shooting people in cold blood in our home town if we had the power to stop it. NO GROUND TROOPS! But a week or so of letting the Navy and Air Force clue these murderous savages in to the fact that, no; God is not amused by the mass murder and torture of innocent men women and children is not going to cause me to lose any sleep.

[Reub]

So what happened to the usual non interventionist mantra? Shouldn't we just stay at home and mind our own business?  Isn't our involvement just going to create more terrorists?

[Ad Orientem]

So what happened to the usual non interventionist mantra? Shouldn't we just stay at home and mind our own business?  Isn't our involvement just going to create more terrorists?

See my comment above.

[Tortoise]

I have less than zero sympathy for the murderous savages of ISIS.  I strongly fear, however, that the U.S.'s involvement will just make things worse in the long term for Iraq.  I am simply afraid there is no good ending to this.

In the words of the Islamic State Press Officer in that Vice video, the ending to this is when they "raise the flag of Allah in the White House."

[Pointedstick]

I have less than zero sympathy for the murderous savages of ISIS.  I strongly fear, however, that the U.S.'s involvement will just make things worse in the long term for Iraq.  I am simply afraid there is no good ending to this.

In the words of the Islamic State Press Officer in that Vice video, the ending to this is when they "raise the flag of Allah in the White House."

Indeed. Will they be successful? No. But will they fail because of us ignoring them? I'm afraid not.

I absolutely agree with you, TennPaGa. No good solutions here. Iraq is an unstable mess, and once we stop killing IS fighters, in all likelihood, someone else will simply take over. But that doesn't mean we should ignore pleas for help from innocents who wish to avoid being slaughtered, IMHO. I absolutely do not think we should be the world's police, but as long as we still have the military capacity to do it, we should use that as a force for good when asked. And I can't think of anyone more worthy of being blown to smithereens than these religious fundamentalist butchers.

[Reub]

You are not being the world's police when the murderers have you as their target. You are instead being your own police. If we ignore the problem now as Obama has tried to do for 6 years we only make it worse later...like a cancer.

[dualstow]

Totally. I mean, we could have minded our own business while Panzers were rolling into Poland -- come to think of it, we did, as long as we could.

[Ad Orientem]

Totally. I mean, we could have minded our own business while Panzers were rolling into Poland -- come to think of it, we did, as long as we could.

Of course the flip side of that, is that there would have been no panzers rolling into Poland, if we had minded our own business in 1917.

[Benko]

I have less than zero sympathy for the murderous savages of ISIS.  I strongly fear, however, that the U.S.'s involvement will just make things worse in the long term for Iraq.  I am simply afraid there is no good ending to this.

In the words of the Islamic State Press Officer in that Vice video, the ending to this is when they "raise the flag of Allah in the White House."

Indeed. Will they be successful? No. But will they fail because of us ignoring them? I'm afraid not.

I absolutely agree with you, TennPaGa. No good solutions here. Iraq is an unstable mess, and once we stop killing IS fighters, in all likelihood, someone else will simply take over. But that doesn't mean we should ignore pleas for help from innocents who wish to avoid being slaughtered, IMHO. I absolutely do not think we should be the world's police, but as long as we still have the military capacity to do it, we should use that as a force for good when asked. And I can't think of anyone more worthy of being blown to smithereens than these religious fundamentalist butchers.

PS,

I understand wanting to help (and generally agree), but without a long term strategy/endgame I don't see where this goes. 

[Ad Orientem]

In the words of the Islamic State Press Officer in that Vice video, the ending to this is when they "raise the flag of Allah in the White House."

Indeed. Will they be successful? No. But will they fail because of us ignoring them? I'm afraid not.

I absolutely agree with you, TennPaGa. No good solutions here. Iraq is an unstable mess, and once we stop killing IS fighters, in all likelihood, someone else will simply take over. But that doesn't mean we should ignore pleas for help from innocents who wish to avoid being slaughtered, IMHO. I absolutely do not think we should be the world's police, but as long as we still have the military capacity to do it, we should use that as a force for good when asked. And I can't think of anyone more worthy of being blown to smithereens than these religious fundamentalist butchers.

PS,

I understand wanting to help (and generally agree), but without a long term strategy/endgame I don't see where this goes.

A fair point. But I am not sure that these are pressing issues when dealing with immediate ongoing acts of barbarous criminality. If someone is running amok in a school, shooting children, do we hold a debate on long term policy implications of crime and guns before taking steps to end the slaughter? This is absolutely a complicated situation and it may well be that there are no ideal solutions here. Life is imperfect and messy. Sometimes you have to act quickly, and at times that means a gut check and going with whatever looks like the lesser of evils.

[dualstow]

Totally. I mean, we could have minded our own business while Panzers were rolling into Poland -- come to think of it, we did, as long as we could.

Of course the flip side of that, is that there would have been no panzers rolling into Poland, if we had minded our own business in 1917.

Perhaps, perhaps not. I mean, not everything can be attributed to a non-aggressor or a previous act of aggression. Saddam wanted Kuwait. Japan was unprovoked, etc.

[Mountaineer]

Here is an interesting chart that confirms evil has been with us for quite a while and is not limited to the Islamic nutcases in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Palestine. 

http://i.imgur.com/vGIdfhy.jpg

... Mountaineer

[dualstow]

Here is an interesting chart that confirms evil has been with us for quite a while and is not limited to the Islamic nutcases in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Palestine. 

http://i.imgur.com/vGIdfhy.jpg

I was watching a UK tv show (fictional) in which some people obsessed with the overpopulation of Earth name Genghis Khan as one of the heroes of humanity- well, of the environment. He thinned the herd, didn't build too much, let the plants grow back.    The people who say this are of course the "bad guys."

[dualstow]

Iraq's Christian exodus? (excerpt below)

I am all for multi-ethnic countries in the West. But, a lot of the horrible ethnic cleansing that has taken place after World War II and the drawing of new borders seems to have - dare I say it - worked.

I don't know if this should be a separate thread, but do you think Iraq should be divided to Kurdistan, Wheyistan and whatever? Along traditional ethnic territorial lines? The Jews give up their homes in Arab lands, but they had a new nation to flow into. Should there be a separate Christian state in Iraq?

LA TIMES:
The world has watched as an extremist group that dubs itself the Islamic State emerged from the chaos of the Syrian civil war to carve out a self-proclaimed caliphate that some say is now the size of the state of Indiana. Uncounted multitudes of Syrians and Iraqis, most of them Muslim, have become casualties.

But for the Christian minority of northwest Iraq, the militants' onslaught has been nothing short of a catastrophe. In the last week, most of the Christian communities of the Nineveh plains have been overrun, forcing perhaps 100,000 people to flee, many to the semiautonomous Kurdish zone that has its capital here in Irbil.

http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast ... story.html

[Reub]

Just bomb them. We can figure out the rest later.

Oh, and Barack, while we are bombing them and you are on another vacation could you please dry up their lucrative banking sources in Qatar and elsewhere?

[Ad Orientem]

Iraq's Christian exodus? (excerpt below)

I am all for multi-ethnic countries in the West. But, a lot of the horrible ethnic cleansing that has taken place after World War II and the drawing of new borders seems to have - dare I say it - worked.

I don't know if this should be a separate thread, but do you think Iraq should be divided to Kurdistan, Wheyistan and whatever? Along traditional ethnic territorial lines? The Jews give up their homes in Arab lands, but they had a new nation to flow into. Should there be a separate Christian state in Iraq?

LA TIMES:
The world has watched as an extremist group that dubs itself the Islamic State emerged from the chaos of the Syrian civil war to carve out a self-proclaimed caliphate that some say is now the size of the state of Indiana. Uncounted multitudes of Syrians and Iraqis, most of them Muslim, have become casualties.

But for the Christian minority of northwest Iraq, the militants' onslaught has been nothing short of a catastrophe. In the last week, most of the Christian communities of the Nineveh plains have been overrun, forcing perhaps 100,000 people to flee, many to the semiautonomous Kurdish zone that has its capital here in Irbil.

http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast ... story.html

The Christian homeland in the Middle East was supposed to be Lebanon. Obviously that didn't work out.

[Mountaineer]

Iraq's Christian exodus? (excerpt below)

I am all for multi-ethnic countries in the West. But, a lot of the horrible ethnic cleansing that has taken place after World War II and the drawing of new borders seems to have - dare I say it - worked.

I don't know if this should be a separate thread, but do you think Iraq should be divided to Kurdistan, Wheyistan and whatever? Along traditional ethnic territorial lines? The Jews give up their homes in Arab lands, but they had a new nation to flow into. Should there be a separate Christian state in Iraq?

LA TIMES:
The world has watched as an extremist group that dubs itself the Islamic State emerged from the chaos of the Syrian civil war to carve out a self-proclaimed caliphate that some say is now the size of the state of Indiana. Uncounted multitudes of Syrians and Iraqis, most of them Muslim, have become casualties.

But for the Christian minority of northwest Iraq, the militants' onslaught has been nothing short of a catastrophe. In the last week, most of the Christian communities of the Nineveh plains have been overrun, forcing perhaps 100,000 people to flee, many to the semiautonomous Kurdish zone that has its capital here in Irbil.

http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast ... story.html

Your post made me think of a possible parallel.  It seems the United States is splitting into two separate groups - urban and rural.  Look at the values (yes, I'm stereotyping) of each "culture"; we seem to be getting further and further apart the more we become more urbanized and the less we are rural.  I wonder how this will turn out?  I'm not advocating returning to a country of 95% farmers, I'm just stating my observation that the further we seem to get from really understanding what it takes to grow food, clothe ourselves, provide for ourselves from our labors, that is not depend on a grocery store or department store or the local drug dealer for our needs, the more disconnected we seem to be from each other and God.  I hope that Chicago and DC do not decide to "ethnically cleanse" those who live in rural Iowa or Nebraska, although at times it does seem that way. 

... Mountaineer

[dualstow]

@mountaineer  I think that's natural, and at least it's not as extreme as in China, where the city dwellers look down on "peasants" with disdain. America is more polarized by political leanings than just about anything else, in my opinion. Still, we're holding together just fine compared to Iraq, right?

[Jan Van]

But a week or so of letting the Navy and Air Force clue these murderous savages in to the fact that, no; God is not amused by the mass murder and torture of innocent men women and children is not going to cause me to lose any sleep.

Who's God? What has he to do with this? Or do you mean, now it's a Christian sect that's threatened, all of a sudden it's time to start bombing them? Weren't they already killing people left and right?