I guess what you have failed to realize is that Kurds can fight for every inch of Kurdush land agsinst ISIS but they can help to defend Baghdad from ISIS too. Chew Gum and Talk at the same time.
Great line in the report:
(At the same time, they must fend off ISIS, the militant face of a spiraling Sunni rebellion against Baghdad that also threatens Iraqi Kurds’ hard-won stability and order.)
You should seriously wipe the foam from your muzzle and go back and re-read what I actually wrote there for clarity…as opposed to simply flying off the handle after reading a word or two. I never said that the invasion was justified in any way, nor that destroying the country was a good idea. I’m not attempting to defend Bush/Chaney et al, and think that the invasion was stupid. That doesn’t detract from the FACT that Iraq is important to pretty much the entire industrialized world, or that securing the oil (reserves and production) isn’t important, since it obviously is. Which is why the US can’t just look the other way, as we could with any country where there wasn’t crucial strategic resources…and, frankly, no one else is going to just stand by and watch it burn either. I don’t know what the US should do, or even what we can do, but we aren’t going to do nothing, and neither will anyone else if looks like the oil will be seriously threatened.
Rooz Bahjay who is a senior security official of the Kurdish Regional Government would like something dropped from the air onto ISIS positions and HQ’s. I think he means we need to kill them now if not sooner.
I’m pretty sure John Mace is wrong. seriously wrong.
You the same issues regarding oil exist today existed back in 2003. You said same issues that drove us to war.
Nothing drove us to war. It was a bad decision that Bush made to cease the UN inspections. There was no threat to oil with inspectors on the ground. The oil was fine until the US invaded.
Haven’t really been following the thread, but I see you are up to your old tricks. Here is the complete quote from John Mace, to put it into context (which you interestingly decided not to do and instead flew off on yet another of your tangents with a side of dishonest strategic misquotation and redirected implication):
[QUOTE=NotfooledbyW]
You the same issues regarding oil exist today existed back in 2003. You said same issues that drove us to war.
[/QUOTE]
No…the same issues made us strategically interested in the region and the security of the resource. I’m fairly certain that it WAS the primary reason Bush et al decided to pull the trigger on the war because of the window of opportunity they saw, with WMD as the excuse.
It wasn’t secure in the minds of Bush and his merry minions because Saddam was a loose cannon. So, they foolishly decided to take the opportunity they had to attempt regime change, with the intent to put a more stable (and US friendly) government in power. But it was always all about the oil.
We’ve argued about this in thread after thread though, so what’s the point in continuing? THIS thread is about what the US should do TODAY in Iraq. The past has already happened now, and hopefully you’ve now skipped ahead to the end chapters in the war by this point and know how it all turned out (like shit), so let’s stick to debating what we should do at this point.
As I’ve said, I have no idea, just that basically doing nothing isn’t going to be a viable option. You can pretty much see that the US is already positioning itself, despite years of meat grinder and cluster fuck, to do something in Iraq. All I can say is I’m fucking glad I’m not in Obama’s shoes.
Oh, he’s up to more than that trick. He just dug for some random cite and doesn’t even realize that the quote is completely tangential to the discussion. And all they need is air strikes form the US? I doubt Obama is going to go there. We are not going to be the Shiite Air Force.
If it was purely ‘in the mind’ of Bush ‘we’ were not driven to invade as I said. He was not ‘driven’ to invade by some outside reality. That is the point about inspectors being in there. That is a reality that all of us including you could see. Bush does not get to be attack a nation because he had his own reality dancing around in his head.
Read it. They are fighting with ammunition because they fear they will be running out in two weeks. They are specifically defending Baghdad from ISiS. That means you have been entirely wrong.
And Obama has not ruled out airstrikes.
The Peshmerga sent to help defend Baghdad were trained by Delta Force. Get it?
No. Being strategically interested is not ‘us’ being driven to war. I am strategically interested now and was then too. But I was not driven to war because even I could see the reality of what was happeing at the time.
I don’t fail to realize that at all. I am saying that it’s not happening. 100 commandos, if I buy this line, is jackshit. More of a training exercise than joining the battle. The fact that’s all you can find should tell you something.
Bottom line is that Iraq is putting out 3 million barrels a day and has the potential to produce more than that.
If ISIS succeeds in capturing Baghdad, would that cut off the flow of oil? If that happened we’d see serious problems- 3 million barrels a day didn’t come off the market in 2008 when prices went above $140/barrel. We’d probably see a bigger spike than that, which would probably spark another round of recession or worse. That would mean the conflict in Iraq is interfering with our interests, along with most other countries’.
I don’t know at what point this conflict shuts off the flow of oil from Iraq. My guess is that, unless this outcome is judged to be inevitable, the US will start blowing shit up before things get to that point. Should we? I dunno, but I think that is how it will shake out.
Both the Kurds and the Shi’ites would keep on pumping oil.
And even if ISIS somehow managed to take over the entire country (not gonna happen), one imagines that the oil would keep on flowing nevertheless - after all, what would ISIS have to gain in cutting off the flow?
Nah, I think the Americans have grown tired of Middle East adventurism for the next decade or so.
We have notoriously sucked at picking sides in the Middle East (going back to Reagan and probably even further) and the current quagmire is a good reason why: The instability of the region means that a group that today might seem the best people to have in charge of a country there might actually be the worst thing in a couple of years.
My instinct is to say that we should do nothing and let whatever happens there happen. Backing anyone in a fight seems foolish and sending in US troops seems even worse.
I agree that with both thoughts that we can’t not do anything and we need to be diplomatic rather than an aggrevator. The fact is that if we can keep from deploying ground troops and usin drones to bomb people we will hopefully be easig a bad situaion rather than increasing it. I’ll be monitering th esituation cloely in Iraq as it has been getting worse and worse. Hopefully there can be some areement made with ISIS to prevent Civil war.
I’m surprised petroleum production gets so much attention in this thread. I think the continued suffering of the Iraqi people, and the risk of continued turmoil and terrorism are far more important.
Anyway, higher-priced, scarcer, petroleum would serve the interests both of environmentalists who want to reduce oil consumption and most businesses which depend on petroleum assets or production.
BTW, I’m as cynical as the next guy about the motives of Cheney, GWB, Rumsfeld et al for their disastrous 2003 invasion, but think oil was at most a secondary consideration.