Thread: Obama Weighs Iraq Air Strikes, Humanitarian Drops

And Osama Bin Laden.

And the Mujahideen

...oh and they are still trying to over throw the syrian government....

More inclined to believe

Americans are training Syria rebels in Jordan: Spiegel | Reuters

West training Syrian rebels in Jordan | World news | theguardian.com

Mideast war in March? ....etc

than the Annenberg Public Policy Center you seem to rely on to be "unbiased and neutral".

Obama never starts a war.... because he simple does not bother with actually declaring war?

Obama




Obama’s New, Undeclared Iraq War
Obama’s new Iraq war began modestly. By the end of his press conference on Saturday though it got a bit bigger.
President Barack Obama’s war in Iraq just got more ambitious.

Speaking to reporters before departing for a two week vacation with his family on Martha’s Vineyard, President Obama said the U.S. had to make sure the Islamic State “is not engaging in actions that could cripple a country.”

Noting the foreign jihadists fighting with the Islamic State, Obama said, “There is going to be a counterterrorism element that we are already preparing for.” And while Obama stressed that the U.S. military cannot solve Iraq’s problems it “can play an extraordinary role in bolstering efforts of an Iraqi partner as they take the right steps to keep the country together.”

No wonder the president said the new military campaign would last months and not weeks.

All of these goals are fine as they are, but they go way beyond the mission Obama spelled out on Friday in a formal notification to Congress that he was launching air strikes inside of Iraq.

That notification said the new missions would be “limited in their scope and duration as necessary to protect American personnel in Iraq by stopping the current advance on Erbil by the terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and to help forces in Iraq as they fight to break the siege of Mount Sinjar and protect the civilians trapped there.”

Obama needed to inform Congress of the air strikes because the legal authority for the president’s new Iraq war stems from the U.S. Constitution’s Article II, which has been interpreted by modern presidents to allow the president to order military action abroad without the consent of Congress.
The 1973 War Powers Resolution requires presidents to notify Congress when invoking Article II powers and to seek authorization from Congress if the new conflict lasts more than 60 days.

In this sense Obama’s new Iraq war is for now undeclared, even though the authorization for the old Iraq war remains on the books. Obama campaigned in 2012 in part on his accomplishment of ending the Iraq War and as recently as last month, his administration urged Congress to repeal the 2002 law that authorized it.

“We have never received the credit we deserve for fighting terrorism. We have been engaged in counter-terrorism more than 25 years before the West.”
On Saturday, Obama got touchy when asked whether he regretted pulling troops out of Iraq at the end of 2011 after Iraq and the U.S. failed to reach a Status of Forces Agreement that would have shielded U.S. troops from the Iraqi justice system, as is common in other countries hosting American military personnel. He said if U.S. troops were in Iraq and the country fell apart the way it has in the last two years, the problem the U.S. would be facing would be worse.

“What I just find interesting is the degree to which this issue keeps coming up as if this was my decision,” he said. “Under the previous administration we had turned over the country to a sovereign, democratically elected Iraqi government. In order for us to maintain troops in Iraq, we needed the invitation of the Iraqi government and we needed assurances our personnel would be immune from prosecution.”

However, in 2011 Maliki at one point did offer to extend immunity to U.S. troops absent a vote from his parliament. At the time, Obama and his top advisers rejected it because they argued any changes to the the U.S. agreement to keep forces in Iraq had to be approved by Iraq’s parliament, where it had no chance of passing.

In June, Colin Kahl, who served as a senior defense official in Obama’s first term, wrote in Politico that Maliki’s offer to sign a memorandum of understanding extending legal protections to U.S. troops was not good enough.

“For any agreement to be binding under the Iraqi constitution, it had to be approved by the Iraqi parliament,” Kahl wrote. “This was the judgment of every senior administration lawyer and Maliki’s own legal adviser, and no senior U.S. military commander made the case that we should leave forces behind without these protections.”

Ironically Obama in 2014 is relying on the same kind of written assurance of legal immunity for U.S. forces without a vote in parliament that he rejected when it was offered in 2011 by Maliki himself.

Either way Obama does not regret the decisions he made in 2011 that ended the U.S. troop presence in the country. He said even if U.S. forces remained in Iraq, they would be at risk because of the decisions made by Maliki to alienate and target his country’s Sunni minority.

As for his critics who say he was wrong to pull out of Iraq, the president showed some teeth. “That entire analysis is bogus and is wrong,” he said. “But it gets frequently peddled around here by folks who often times are trying to defend previous policies that they themselves made.”

Americans are training Syria rebels in Jordan: Spiegel | Reuters MARCH 2013- NOT CURRENT

West training Syrian rebels in Jordan | World news | theguardian.com MARCH 2013- NOT CURRENT


Mideast war in March? FEBRUARY 2012- NOT CURRENT

Nice try, but please supply current sources.

Did you actually read the article which said:

"Several independent journalists and authors who have extensively researched and written about the CIA’s involvement in the Afghanistan conflict with the Soviets in the 1980s support the CIA’s contention. For example, Peter Bergen, a national security analyst for CNN who interviewed bin Laden in 1997, told us, “There is no evidence that the CIA funded or armed bin Laden or even knew who he was until 1993.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/op...iraq.html?_r=0

Back to Iraq

WASHINGTON — IT was exhilarating to drop a bunch of 500-pound bombs on whatstheirname.

Just when Americans thought they could stop trying to figure out the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, we’re in a new war in Iraq with some bad “folks,” as the president might say, whose name we’re still fuzzy on.

We never know what we’re getting into over there, and this time we can’t even agree what to call the enemy. All we know is that a barbaric force is pillaging so swiftly and brutally across the Middle East that it seems like some mutated virus from a sci-fi film.

Most news organizations call the sulfurous spawn of Al Qaeda leading the rampage through Iraq “ISIS,” short for “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” or “Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham.” (Isis is also the name of an Egyptian goddess and the Earl of Grantham’s yellow lab on “Downton Abbey.”) Yet the White House, State Department and United Nations refer to the group as “ISIL,” short for “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.”

The BBC reported that some people have also started referring to the jihadis as “Da’ish” or “Daesh,” a designation that the extremists object to because it is “a seemingly pejorative term that is based on an acronym formed from the letters of the name in Arabic, ‘al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq wa al-Sham.’ ” Al-Sham, the BBC noted, can be translated as “the Levant,” “Greater Syria,” “Syria” or “Damascus.”

Adding to the confusion, ISIS a.k.a. ISIL engaged in a slick “Mad Men” rebranding in June, announcing that, in tribute to its ambition to establish a caliphate, it was renaming itself “the Islamic State.” So then Agence France-Presse began referring to the militants as “IS” or “the group formerly known as ISIS,” and The Wall Street Journal switched to “IS.” The Times, however, still calls our murderous new enemy “ISIS” while quoting administration officials and military officers using the acronym “ISIL.”

It’s a bit odd that the administration is using “the Levant,” given that it conjures up a colonial association from the early 20th century, when Britain and France drew their maps, carving up Mesopotamia guided by economic gain rather than tribal allegiances. Unless it’s a nostalgic nod to a time when puppets were more malleable and grateful to their imperial overlords.

If all that is not confusing enough, we also have to fathom a new entry in the vicious religious wars in Iraq: the Yazidis, a small and secretive sect belonging to one of the oldest surviving religions in the world. Their faith has origins in Islam and Zoroastrianism, a religion founded by the Iranian prophet Zoroaster in the 6th century B.C. As Time pointed out, though the name “Izidis” translates to “worshipers of God,” ISIS considers them “devil-worshipers” who must convert to Islam or be killed.

ISIS mistakenly torments the sect that has survived 72 genocides, The Telegraph explained, because the Yazidis worship a fallen angel called the Malek Tawwus, or Peacock Angel. But unlike Lucifer, their angel sought forgiveness and went back to heaven.

Fifty thousand Yazidis were driven by the jihadis to take refuge on Mount Sinjar in Kurdish-controlled Erbil, where they were trapped and dying of dehydration and exposure, which spurred President Obama to order Navy planes to drop food and water for them.

Continue reading the main story
RECENT COMMENTS

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The more US resists repeating the Bush follies of committing to avoidable wars, or after that, entrapping itself again into the Middle East...
mivogo 1 hour ago
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James Gash 1 hour ago
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SEE ALL COMMENTS WRITE A COMMENT
Although it felt momentarily bracing to see American pilots trying to save innocents in a country we messed up so badly that it’s not even a country any more, some critics warned that the pinprick bombings were a political gesture, not a military strategy, and “almost worse than nothing,” as John McCain put it.

The latest turn of the screw in Iraq also underscored how we keep getting pulled back, “Godfather”-style, without ever understanding the culture. Our boneheaded meddling just creates ever-more-virulent monsters. The United States has taken military action in Iraq during at least 17 of the last 24 years, the ultimate mission creep in a country smaller than Texas on the other side of the world.

What better symbol of the Middle East quicksand than the fact that Navy planes took off for their rescue mission — two years after Obama declared the war in Iraq over — from the George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea?

CONTINUE READING THE MAIN STORY
60
COMMENTS
Bush Senior’s war to expel Saddam from Kuwait — a gas station of a country chockablock with spoiled rich Arabs — would not have been necessary if Saddam, a tyrant first enabled by J.F.K.’s C.I.A., had not been given the wrong signals by our side. W.’s war with Saddam, the prodigal son’s effort at outdoing his father, ended up undoing Iraq and the neglected Afghanistan.

Caught in the Sunni backlash and the back draft of his predecessor’s misguided attempt to impose democracy, Obama is leery and proceeding cautiously. But what can he do? He has dispatched a few hundred advisers to Iraq to fix something that couldn’t be fixed with the hundreds of thousands of troops over a decade.

Some fellow Democrats are fretting that the pull of Iraq will be too strong, after Obama spokesman Josh Earnest said, “The president has not laid out a specific end date.” Iraq, after all, is a country that seems to have a malignant magnetism for our leaders.


Bit like this really....Its not the kids on the merry go round causing the problem...

Originally Posted by rickschoppers

Nice try, but please supply current sources.

He cant.

Because there are none.

Originally Posted by bsnub

Originally Posted by rickschoppers

Nice try, but please supply current sources.

He cant.

How the West bankrolls Isis: Millions from governments and NGOs funding radical Islamic terror group - BelfastTelegraph.co.uk

http://rt.com/usa/179036-islamic-state-white-house/

Winning the longest war - NY Daily News

Our World: Congress, Obama and the way to defeat Hamas | JPost | Israel News

Is Obama cabal cracking under pressure?



....and many more from the past few months.

How much more recent do you want?

Either of your care to stick to the topic at hand? Sure, Snubb will not find this on Obamanoshers.com or what ever his preferred news source is, but that does not necessarily mean it is not true

(nb, RT inserted just to give both you jokers an easy "commie bastard" retort which will in turn allow me to point out that RT is just as valid as any of the vacuous obama sycophantic rags you might bring to the table).

I would have to counter with this, so we are back to who's sources do you believe? Both sides sound credible and have opposing opinions, so who is telling the truth? Nobody, which has been my point in previous posts. Who can anyone believe these days?

America's Allies Are Funding ISIS - The Daily Beast

All you need to know about ISIS and what is happening in Iraq ? RT News

along with others.

Originally Posted by rickschoppers

Who can anyone believe these days?

How about ANY politician in a senior position of ANY political party, pretty much world wide can NEVER be believed. Ever.

How the West bankrolls Isis: Millions from governments and NGOs funding radical Islamic terror group - BelfastTelegraph.co.uk

An article mentioning that NGO's are supplying humanitarian aid to ISIS held areas. The headline is deceptive and is in no way evidence. FAIL

http://rt.com/usa/179036-islamic-state-white-house/

Rt is a crap source, but the article does try and link Saudi and Kuwait to providing financial aid to the "myriad" of Syrian rebels many of who are openly fighting ISIS. FAIL

Winning the longest war[at] - NY Daily News

Off topic article about Afganistan with no mention of ISIS. FAIL

Our World: Congress, Obama and the way to defeat Hamas | JPost | Israel News

Off topic article about Isreal and HAMAS no mention of ISIS. FAIL

Is Obama cabal cracking under pressure?

WorldNetDaily? Really? You must be joking a crackpot conservative website. FAIL

Read about these wackos here;

http://www.splcenter.org/get%20infor.../WorldNetDaily

Like I said you have no evidence. Just conspiracy theory.

Originally Posted by pseudolus

ANY politician in a senior position of ANY political party, pretty much world wide can NEVER be believed. Ever.

remember watching 2 supposedly intelligent arch-bishops arguing about the validity of the Virgin birth.

and i wondered, where did it all go wrong.

Originally Posted by billy the kid

Originally Posted by pseudolus

ANY politician in a senior position of ANY political party, pretty much world wide can NEVER be believed. Ever.

remember watching 2 supposedly intelligent arch-bishops arguing about the validity of the Virgin birth.

and i wondered, where did it all go wrong.

It all went wrong about the time of the virgin birth...

Originally Posted by Necron99

virgin birth...

Is there a justgiving campaign for that baby as well, and is the daddy a pedo?

Originally Posted by pseudolus

Originally Posted by Necron99

virgin birth...

Is there a justgiving campaign for that baby as well, and is the daddy a pedo?

Make up your own mind...

Alternatively the bombing of ISIS forces at Erbil could be this:

Home | Consulate General of the United States Erbil, Iraq
Source US Gov web site.


Somebody would know what goes on in these places.

Originally Posted by OhOh

A map which purports to show the amount, the red bits, of Iraq the separatists control. Overlay it with the oil fields and things may become clear. Overlay it with the oil/gas pipelines, present and proposed, and you may see the linkage to crusader coalition and Israel.

Axis of evil defending their goodies then and kicking Iran off of theirs then?

Originally Posted by pseudolus

Originally Posted by rickschoppers

Who can anyone believe these days?

How about ANY politician in a senior position of ANY political party, pretty much world wide can NEVER be believed. Ever.

I definitely agree with that. So, we are in agreement.

Here is a link to an interview a Jihad leader during which he points fingers at a number of crusader coalition countries and other Jihad leaders.

"With us here in the studio Sheikh Nabeel Naim former founder of Jihad Organization & expert in Islamist groups, welcome. "

ISIS: The Bombshell Interview to Impeach Obama

US sending arms to Kurds in Iraq

APNewsBreak: US sending arms to Kurds in Iraq

These are the friendly ones right?

Lets hope this weeks "friendly" terrorists remain so.

It looks like the US has just continued its strategy of arming all middle east factions. The hope is that they will just kill each other off while the west continues to sits back and watch.

This would be my personal solution to the middle east woes.

Turkey, who has just voted for another 5 years of the same government, will not be too happy. Maybe they will move towards Russia and make the Black Sea a Turkish/Russian lake!