Well, I sure don’t want him to improvise in a reactive fashion, as if we couldn’t control events! No sir! People won’t respect us if we can’t control the Sunni, the Shia, Iran, the IS, Syria, Israel, the Pope and the weather.
I think our best bet right now is helping the Kurds. If they can hand IS a defeat, it will go a long way towards countering the narrative of having God on their side.
What do I think IS will do? I think they will blow up that dam because its big, dramatic and stupid. Which is what crazy people love more than anything.
To answer the question more directly, I won’t know what I want him to do until the other guy does what he’s gonna do. He’s operating at a huge disadvantage, he doesn’t have any smart moves, so he has to figure out the least stupid.
And if I had to pick someone to make that choice, it would be him. Assuming that you are too busy, of course…
Democrats have been playing a dangerous game with the airpower-only BS. It’s one of those things that works great until it doesn’t and then you’ve got two choices: retreat with your tail between your legs, or commit ground troops.
You seem to trust Obama to retreat should airpower fail. I apparently have more faith in him than you do, and I’m not even a supporter. I think that Obama, like any President who doesn’t want to go down in history as a total failure, will do whatever it takes to see us to victory. There’s no such thing in war as dipping your toe in. Once you’re in, you’re in it until you win or lose. Obama will see that we win.
You, sir, would be hard pressed to be stupider if you tried. Quite aside from the fact that Saddam Hussein was not imposed upon Iraq by the Soviet Union (your original claim), you seem to have been unable to retain this pertinent bit of information in what passes as the grey matter in your head when reading from one sentence to the next. Here, I’ll even bold it for you this time:
The mission is to prevent ISIS from taking over Kurdish land, and to prevent them from massacring the Yazidis. It’s a limited, doable mission, and if bombing doesn’t work, then the President will use ground troops to fulfill the mission. It’s not like we haven’t done it before. The first Bush did it with Operation Provide Comfort. If we could protect the Kurds from Saddam Hussein’s huge military, we can certainly protect the Kurds from a band of fighters.
Soviet support is what kept Saddam in power long after his people would have overthrown him. Without that massive army he would have been hanged a long time ago. At worst, he wouldn’t have been able to engage in his adventurism.
Wild supposition. Who would have ousted Saddam between 1979 and 1984?
And besides, which adventurism are you talking about? Because if it was after, oh, about 1983, much of Saddam’s military support came from a very different source. That included, by the by, “dual-use” technology like chemical weapon precursors, anthrax, botulism, and the motherfucking bubonic plague.
I imagine you have a sliver of an argument that Saddam managed to stage his coup and thereafter retain power by virtue of an army that had to that point been greatly built and supported by the USSR. But if that’s what you’re trying to say, you’re making a complete hash of it. And frankly, it’s a silly point anyway.
Elucidator, I have been told by nearly 100% of liberals that after 9/11 no President would have failed to take military action against the terrorists that attacked us. Given liberal reluctance to fight ISIS, which subscribes to the very same goals as al Qaeda, I have to wonder if that was ever really true.
Saddam started working for the CIA as an assassin, trying to kill the then-ruler of Iraq, Qasim. He failed and got shot by his own men, and the CIA evacuated him. Eventually he got into power and the Americans gave him satellite intel and aerial weaponry to fight Iran. He was an ally of the USA, not the USSR.
No. All the territory that would be destroyed is territory they occupy. Of course if the fighting between IS and their former allies amongst former-Saddam troops continues, or someone pushes them back to Mosul, then they might. It’s more likely that they just won’t maintain the damn, which is built on gypsum, properly and it will collapse, which could happen at any minute.
Given that Maliki is currently staging a coup against the Iraqi constitution they’re probably more likely to drown in blood than the waters of the Mosul dam.
I take it back, you can be stupider if you try. The Iraqi Army was anything but massive before the 1980 invasion of Iran, with a total strength of 12 divisions. While the size of the divisions became somewhat smaller, the number of them ballooned during the 8 year long meat grinding slugfest to over 44 divisions. Here are some actual figures for you to ignore:
You may recall much being made of Iraq having the 4th largest army in the world after the Iran-Iraq War. Secondly, and much more importantly, what the fuck do you call his invasion of Iran in 1980 if not blind adventurism to take advantage of what was misperceived as Iranian weakness in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution in 1979 that proved to bite him in the ass? It seems I have to remind you yet again that
Odd, by far his greatest adventurism and the Soviets cut him off - were, in fact the only ones to cut him off for the first couple of years after he started the war.* He invaded Kuwait in 1990, two years after the Iran-Iraq War ended because he was massively in debt to Kuwait and other Gulf States, and to a much lesser degree Europe and the US which had bankrolled him in the war against Iran. He was in effect trying to pay off his mortgage by robbing the bank that had lent it to him and was hoping to intimidate the other Gulf States he was in debt to to forgiving the loans or suffer Kuwait’s fate. So if you want to blame anyone for the massive growth in the size of his army and his ability to sustain his 8 year failed adventurism in Iran followed by his failed adventurism in Kuwait in an attempt to avoid paying the piper, you can blame Kuwait and the very Gulf States that lent him huge amounts of money out of their fear of Iran.
Oh, and by the way, Iraq never had that many T-72s; by far most of it was earlier Warsaw Pact gear and a hell of a lot of it was Chinese knock-offs, not even Soviet or even Warsaw Pact at all. See here. Note for example 1,500 Type 69 MBTs, 2,323 YW531 APCs, and 623 YW701 APCs. Even a lot of your precious MiGs were in fact Chendu J-7s, a MiG-21 knockoff and Shenyang J-6s, a MiG-19 knockoff.
Ugg, this shit just never dies. None of Saddam’s military support came from the US; not before 1983, not after 1983. The US did not sell or give so much as a single rifle, tank, bullet, combat aircraft, ship, or artillery piece to Iraq. Go ahead, try to prove me wrong. It never happened. Rumsfeld, AKA the Antichrist shaking his hand doesn’t change that fact. Remember the big stink about being shot at by our own weapons we had sold to the Shah whenever we had a dust-up with Iran? Remember the complete lack of such a stink during Desert Storm or that unholy 2003 invasion of Iraq? “Dual-use” technology refers to the fact that the equipment used in the manufacture of chemical and biological weaponry is the same equipment that has perfectly legitimate uses in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Nerve gas was first developed as a pesticide. US chemical companies sold Iraq some dual-use equipment, and it is pretty hard to act all innocent about knowing what it was actually being used for, which is why three people were convicted of export offenses - in Germany. By far Iraq’s chemical weapons program came from Europe, with Germany at the top of the list, being responsible for 52% of its chemical weapons manufacturing equipment. Very little of it came from the US. Cite: