This morning, CNN has a crawl at the bottom insisting that Barack will be at the Pentagon today to discuss ISIS strategy.
And this is treated as news -- despite that it's not new in the sense of novel, despite the fact that it's nothing but repetition.
What Barack should be doing is visiting the State Dept today and demanding to know exactly what the department's doing to address the issues that allowed the Islamic State to take root in Iraq to begin with.
Here's the short answer to that: Not one damn thing.
In February 2014, Human Rights Watch issued (PDF format warning) "
‘No One Is Safe’: Abuses of Women in Iraq’s Criminal Justice System," and we'll probably discuss this in the next snapshot in relation to Robin Morgan and her embrace of useless and stupid. But for right now, we'll quote from the report, an Iraqi women who explains, "We don’t know who we fear more, Al Qaeda or SWAT. Why would we help them fight
Al Qaeda when they’ll just come for us as soon as they’re done with
them?"
What has been done to address that?
Not a damn thing.
SWAT?
I realize that the Robin Morgan's of the world had their heads stuck up their ass and couldn't pay attention in real time but what's everyone else's excuse?
These were the government forces Nouri used to regularly attack Sunnis.
Nouri's gone!
Yes, he is and that apparently solved nothing.
The White House replaced him in August of 2014 with Haider al-Abadi but that's all that changed.
(Hell, Nouri still occupies the home of the prime minister all this time later -- and Haider's been prime minister -- in name for almost 16 months now.)
Officials in the Shiite-majority government aligned with
Iran are making moves to consolidate power, quietly purging Sunnis from
the rolls of the military.
Several
hundred senior Sunni officials in the Iraqi military have been fired
and replaced with members of the Badr Corps, a Shiite militia created
and supported by Iran, according to a U.S. official and sources in the
region.
The Iraqi Ministry of Interior has also fired several
thousands of other Sunni security forces in the past several weeks
while continuing to arrest and “disappear” thousands of Sunnis, the
sources said.
How does that help?
It doesn't.
And how is it different from the US government's insisting upon de-Ba'athification at the start of the Iraq War?
It's not.
And that de-Ba'athifcation?
Witness after witness to the Iraqi Inquiry testified that this was one of the biggest mistakes, that it fed Sunni resistance. These were British government officials, British military officers and British intelligence officials. And over and over, their testimony was that de-Ba'athification was a huge mistake.
(And many added that they said so in real time and tried to stop the implementation of de-Ba'athification.)
Yet it's happening all over again.
And Barack's up to the Pentagon today?
The stupidity is never-ending.
June 19, 2014, he declared publicly that the only solution to Iraq's various crises was a political solution.
But he and the State Dept have failed to focus on that.
Barack's always ready to bomb and kill.
But bombing and killing is not new to Iraq.
And bombing and killing didn't terminate the Islamic State.
It fostered it, it helped it grow.
And as he repeats (yet again) the mistakes of Bully Boy Bush, who will have the guts to say, "Enough"?
He's been bombing Iraq since August 2014.
There's no real progress despite all those bombs.
He's continuing to add US military forces.
That's not addressed the problem either.
Again, he's making the same mistakes Bully Boy Bush made.
There's also the glaring stupidity on the part of so many.
The 'surge' was a two-part approach Bully Boy Bush attempted. You can declare it a failure if you want.
But the first part wasn't a failure.
The first part was the large influx of US troops. They were supposed to stabilize the security situation. They did (a larger discussion would note that they also allowed the Shi'ite government to carry out ethnic cleansing). The second part was that this stability would allow the Iraqi government to focus on governing.
They never did.
The second part was a failure.
Barack's dropping bombs and adding US troops.
But the Iraqi government is taking no actions to benefit from this.
No positive actions.
The persecution of Sunnis continues.
And since that's the very thing that allowed the Islamic State to take root in Iraq, let's stop pretending that anything's being accomplished -- anything positive.
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