By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--August 11, 2014
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U.S. Central Command reported Sunday that pilots and drones hit specific, small assets of the Islamic State forces near Irbil, destroying three vehicles and damaging two others. And Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights spokesman Kamil Amin told CNN that up to 20,000 Yazidi Iraqis, who have been targeted by the militants, had been rescued and taken to safety near the Syrian border. However, thousands remain trapped on a mountain, scrambling for food and water dropped by U.S. airlifts. Obama had said Saturday that he would commit no ground troops, but the airstrikes may be a prolonged campaign. "I don't think we're going to solve this problem in weeks," he said. "I'm not going to give a particular timetable, because, as I've said from the start, wherever and whenever U.S. personnel and facilities are threatened, it's my obligation, my responsibility as commander in chief to make sure they are protected."
Kurdish forces retook Sunday two towns from Islamic militants that have seized large parts of northern Iraq in one of the first victories for a military force that until now has been in retreat, a senior Kurdish military official says. Brig. Gen. Shirko Fatih said the Kurdish fighters were able to push the militants of the Islamic State group out of the villages of Makhmour and al-Gweir, some 27 miles from Irbil. The victories by the radical Sunni militants that adhere to an extremist intolerant interpretation of Islam have sent tens of thousands of the country's minorities fleeing from their homes in fear in a situation that has grabbed world attention. The United States announced a fourth round of airstrikes Sunday against militant vehicles and mortars firing on Irbil as part of its small-scale series of attacks meant to discourage the Sunni fighters from endangering U.S. personnel near the Kurdish capital.Question: If the Kurds can re-take towns from ISIS this quickly given the support of U.S. air power, how could this situation have been different if we had deployed it when ISIS first starting rolling through the country? I think you know the answer.
In a speech on state television, Mr Maliki accused Iraqi President Fouad Masoum, a Kurd, of violating the constitution by missing a deadline for him to ask the biggest political bloc to nominate a prime minister and form a government. "I will submit today an official complaint to the federal court against the president of the Republic for committing a clear constitutional violation for the sake of political calculations," said Mr Maliki. Serving in a caretaker capacity since an inconclusive election in April, Mr Maliki has defied calls by Sunnis, Kurds, some fellow Shiites, regional power broker Iran and Iraq's top Shiite cleric for him to step aside for a less polarising figure. The troop movements have raised speculation that they may mark the start of a coup by Mr Maliki to take full control of the government. A western security expert based in Iraq said that Mr Maliki deployed militia and elite special forces units around the International Zone prior to giving the speech.Maliki's position is basically that because his political allies won the most seats in Parliament in the recent elections, he should get a third term. The Iraqi constitution doesn't make that automatic, though, and clearly the Kurds are one of many groups that would like to see Maliki ousted.
“This issue keeps on coming up as if this was my decision,” Obama retorted when asked if he had any second thoughts, in light of the terrorist force taking over regions of Iraq, about having pulled all American troops out of the country. “The reason that we did not have a follow-on force in Iraq was because a majority of Iraqis did not want U.S. troops there and politically they could not pass the kind of laws that would be required to protect our troops in Iraq,” he said. A report in The New Yorker showed how President Obama failed to secure the status of forces agreement necessary to leave the troops in place after 2011. Dexter Filkins explained: President Obama, too, was ambivalent about retaining even a small force in Iraq. For several months, American officials told me, they were unable to answer basic questions in meetings with Iraqis – like how many troops they wanted to leave behind – because the administration had not decided. “We got no guidance from the White House,” Jeffrey told me. “We didn’t know where the president was. Maliki kept saying, ‘I don’t know what I have to sell.’ ” At one meeting, Maliki said that he was willing to sign an executive agreement granting the soldiers permission to stay, if he didn’t have to persuade the parliament to accept immunity. The Obama administration quickly rejected the idea. “The American attitude was: Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible,” Sami al-Askari, the Iraqi member of parliament, said. When Obama announced the withdrawal, he portrayed it as the culmination of his own strategy. “After taking office, I announced a new strategy that would end our combat mission in Iraq and remove all of our troops by the end of 2011,” he said. “So today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year.”This is not a new argument from Obama. When he's talking to his left-wing base, he brags that he got us out of Iraq. But when he needs to push back against the argument that he contributed to the mess in Iraq by completely abandoning the country, he tries to blame Maliki for not backing a law granting U.S. soldiers immunity from possible war crimes charges. The truth is that every agreement needs to be negotiated, and when the opposite party faces an issue with resistance from those it needs on board, you've got to work with said opposite party to find a solution to the problem. You're only going to do that if you're motivated to do it, and Obama wasn't because he really wasn't interested in keeping a U.S. presence in Iraq at all. To get a status of forces agreement, what Obama needed to do was give Maliki a proposal that Maliki could take to the Iraqi parliament as an argument for why it was in Iraq's best interests to give up on the idea of prosecuting U.S. soldiers, and accept instead that the security U.S. forces would provide would be worth making the concession. Nations have to work through issues like this all the time before coming to such agreements. What Obama did here was use the issue as an excuse to abandon the effort entirely. His desired outcome at the time was to stand up and tell voters, a year before he would have to stand for re-election, that he had kept his promise to get out of Iraq. You will remember he beat up Mitt Romney for (according to the Obama campaign) wanting to keep 30,000 U.S. forces in Iraq, when the political winds favored keeping zero there. Now that we've had to rejoin the Iraq battle, and it's clear our abandonment played a major role in clearing the way for ISIS to overrun the country, Obama has to go back to the nonsense that it wasn't his idea to leave, and that the Iraqis didn't want us there. What a joke.
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