Anti-Bush, to excess.
Thankfully. Bush’s tactics in that region should be Obama’s blueprint of what NOT to do.
This lady had some pretty firm opinions tonight:
We have bombed Iraq enough. it’s time to just walk away. Fix our own country before we police another one. There are plenty of problems that need to be solved right here in the USA.
Interesting. Certainly condemns the Obama administration, doesn’t she?
See above for the argument I was addressing. It has NOTHING to do with Bush’s policy. Nothing.
Later, people came in and posited that Bush’s policy was worse. OK. I agreed. Bush is teh suxxor. Bush is the worstest president ever. So, now that we’re all in agreement on that, what about Obama’s policy is “working”?
I can see where you’re coming from. but it’s a poor assessment of our president: I consider his policies to be successful if he just doesn’t get any Americans killed while trying to do what he’s trying to do. I set a higher standard for our presidents, but that’s just me. I expect them to not put American lives in unnecessary danger the first place.
That is not to say I can’t grade on a curve when I have to-- in the next election. I don’t like Obama’s policy in Iraq, but I if I had to choose between his policy and the typical Republican policy, I’d take Obama’s any day. Yes, he’s less worse than the alternative.
I just get frustrated when we’re trying to assess Obama’s policy’s and someone insists that we sidetrack the discussion to the fact that Bush’s were worse. OK, OK, OK!! Bush’s policies were worse. So fucking what??? XT posted a thread and asked us what we should do next, not what Bush did 10 years ago.
[Missed the edit window…
And please go back and read the specific post I was responding to: Stay the course! If you really want to talk about Bush, maybe you should take it up with Inbred Domesticus and remind him how that sounds oddly familiar.
There’s nothing much we can or should do.
We have these warring factions that are more than willing to die for their cause. We’ve backed and trained a few different groups that ultimately turned on us later. It’s a damned if you do scenario.
We’re offering some air support and intel and that’s about as far as we should go. We’ve spent billions training and arming the Iraqi military. Now it’s up to them to get the job done. They need to be the force on the front line, and they need to suffer the consequences of battle. After all, it is their country.
I agree that the comparison to Bush is unnecessary and sidetracks us from the main topic. Obama’s policy on events in Syria and Iraq has been weak because the administration failed to act on the rise of militant Islamic militias in Syria and then Iraq.
This approach of using airstrikes to support local forces seems to be successful in promoting victory of the side we favor almost anywhere it is used. Please don’t take that last sentence to mean that I believe we leave the consequences of this support to nothing more than rolling the dice.
Now specific to ISIS: just look at the first two maps in this article: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-27838034. ISIS has lost a lot of territory since 2014. There is a very good correlation between our bombing and lost territory. There is a very good correlation between how we are supporting Iraqi forces and the presence of oil fields (see later maps). We did not expend much on Ramadi. It’s not strategically important.
The only bombing that seems to have supported a symbolic victory is Kobane. Still, it has enhanced our cooperation with the Kurds and handed ISIS a large defeat. Mostly ISIS is winning the propaganda war but ultimately that will mean nothing. This strategy is working to return control of the most important parts of Iraq to the Iraqi government while cutting off ISIS’ funding. Let them enjoy their press over Ramadi.
Here’s a recent ISIS Ramadi victory parade
Read lots of reports of various bombing raids taking out one banged up Toyota pickup here and two miserable guys with Kalashnikovs there, but here’s a whole target rich parade with hundreds or thousands of vehicles and ISIS fighters not being touched. One could certainly be excused for getting the impression that the US & Western strategy is to just keep ISIS from not becoming too much of a nuisance, but not completely destroyed either. Perhaps to offset Assad/Hezbollah. That’d absolutely be more nasty than anything I could subscribe to.
Has it been though?
At the start of the rise of the militants, it was expected the Iraqi army would step up. As it should have been. We were asked to leave and allow them control. It would have been unappreciated if we’d have jumped in, took over and started bombing. Or whatever. It quickly became apparent the Iraqi army in the Sunni regions could (would) not preform. This revealed the depth of Shia governments unfair treatment of the Sunnis. What respect would we have gotten just bombing the Sunnis and letting Bagdad continue oppressing them? We would have had to kill a lot of Sunnis to free up space for Bagdad to take over. And who knows how we’d have left the Sunnis and the region after a “quick bombing” and it’s doubtful the Sunnis would have “greeted us as liberators”.
No, sorry, this is mainly Bagdad and the Iraqis fight. Our intervention, meddling, whatever, will not get us what we want, give us a bad name, suck our resources, and probably end up in a who knows how many years long quagmire. We should do no more than what we are doing. It’s not tough love…it’s just that it’s not our war to fight.
ISIS?
Oh, Barry Obama? Yeah, well, I can’t imagine Ted Cruz or Scott Walker having the foggiest idea what to do in this case.
Presumably Foggy Bottom has been analyzing this up, down, and sideways. But the best plan in the world may be useless to the USA given the politicization of foreign policy since W. Bush.
Well, she does - though it is in the context of the previous President making war on a country for entirely bogus reasons.
I guess a lot of people would agree with what Obama did - and you also see it in this thread; get the hell out of that mess we can’t do anything.
That’s code for ‘we can’t do ourselves any good now’ and, unfortunately, that doesn’t work out too well in the longer term.
It’ll be the same in Afghanistan.
LOL. No. This is a country forged by the USA . And the USA is just walking away again.
But hey, jobs are up, the economy is booming, and a brave new election cycle has begun: God Bless America.
What alternative universe are you living in ?
The economy sucks, it is not booming. The monthly job reports are always adjusted downwards the following month. The % of the population in the work force is exceptionally low by historical standards. The bad news goes on and on.
But hey, continue to ignore it all. Many are. Yes yes yes in my alternative universe things in Iraq are swell never been better, and the economy is booming never been better.Don’t worry, be happy.
Odd that you were addressing that argument but quoted and referred to an entirely different one. And you still don’t get why Bush’s policy is relevant to your question.
I don’t think you’re fully getting what I’m saying – what should we do next? Nothing. At least, nothing militarily. Supporting (logistically) the opposition is fine. I’ll support nothing (militarily) over airstrikes, and I’ll support airstrikes over ground forces involvement. But I am assessing Obama’s policy, and I am talking about what we should do next – Obama’s policy is far better than ground-force involvement, if not as good as no military involvement at all, and what we should do next in the region is nothing militarily.
One thing that’s bugging me about the whole ISIS thing is how no-one cares that the U.S. government spent ten years and billions of dollars to build an effective Iraqi military, and utterly failed at their task. I don’t want to assign blame here - it’s just that this is probably not the last time the U.S. will be involved in nation-building, and without investigating what went wrong, you’ll just make all of the same mistakes all over again.
I don’t know why anyone supports the notion of doing nothing. It’s insane to do nothing about the spread of ISIS. Besides all the terrible things they do, it is simply irrational to give up huge oil fields to ISIS when they could be in the hands of far more compliant, even friendly governments such as Iraq or the KRG. It is irrational to force all the governments in the region to choose between cooperating with us and cooperating with ISIS. They will cooperate with ISIS because they are right on their border or in their territory.
What do we have to do to make our strategy work? Do exactly what we’ve done since we got involved: support faction we like with airstrikes, take over useful territory from ISIS, cooperate with local governments to prevent new recruits from entering Syria or Iraq, train and retrain local forces, and stick to the plan. This costs us relatively little while eroding away at one of the ugliest forms of militant Islam we have seen. You need to accept the reality that we’ll be fighting militant Islamic groups in one form or another for years to come. We are adapting our tactics and they seem to be working.