The red portion of your cite doesn’t say that the Kurds are fighting ISIS “on the road to Baghdad.”
It says that a) the Kurds “must fend off” ISIS, and that b) ISIS is “the militant face of a spiraling Sunni rebellion against Baghdad.”
And your choice of not reading what I write with comprehension and then tearing after a strawman indicates a lot…well, to anyone at this point not familiar with you and your fixations and little games you play.
So, you quoted me twice and replied in two separate posts of your own, yet you still haven’t got a fucking clue what I actually said, what my point was or, well, basically anything at all. I don’t know why you feel that using strawman arguments after quoting me twice (unless you think that no one else can read what I wrote either…or, that whole ‘what, they can scroll up??’ blind spot you have) is going to work out for you, but you just keep on trying that out.
Exactly. It says they are consolidating and defending their autonomous homeland.
I have seen far too many instances of people saying ‘you’re misquoting me’. I’m not going to run down the facts of prior ones but from this moment forward I will do so and warnings will be issued if I believe there’s any actual misquoting going on.
Get me?
Fine with me, with the caveat that cutting and pasting a snippet and then building a strawman that goes against the spirit of the original post is also going to be included, since that is the MO of <deleted poster name>, er, some folks in this thread.
I don’t think people are unsympathetic towards the suffering of the Iraqi people. I just think it has been demonstrated clearly enough for just about everyone to understand that our involvement will only make it worse.
Taking 3 million barrels a day off the market all at once, however, is going to cause suffering around the world (this neato chart helps show how most countries around the world would be more negatively affected than the US). One doesn’t have to be an ‘environmentalist’ to want less carbon pollution, but I don’t think a 3 million barrel a day stair step down is the way to go about it- poor people around the world would starve, not to mention that a lot of Americans would be forced to put more of their nachos budget onto credit, if they didn’t cut back altogether.
So, intervening in a civil war to prevent an oil supply disruption both causes and prevents suffering, probably heavily tilted to the ‘prevent’ side globally. Intervening just to ‘liberate’ or whatever the/some Iraqi people will just make things worse overall, and make a few more warmongers wealthy.
Maybe we should recognize the Kurdish state and work out some kind of business arrangement with them. The US doesn’t want Maliki staying in power, but obviously neither does ISIS, so we should probably quit pretending we’re taking anyone’s side but our own, and work for a diplomatic solution from there.
At what point is maintaining the flow of Iraq’s oil counter-productive? If it costs trillions of dollars to maintain current import levels, aren’t we distorting the market and artificially holding down prices? Is it worth considering allowing the resource be appropriately priced and letting the market sort it out?
A sharp rise in price-at-the-pump would disrupt and depress the economy of every industrial nation. That was a principal cause of the inflation of the 1970s in the U.S. – it was not something monetary policy could fix, it was caused by a real cost external to the national economy.
And depressing the price of oil was supposedly one of the goals of the Iraq War in the first place, at least from the neocons’ POV – they wanted to use Iraq’s oil to break the back of OPEC, with its tiresome production quotas. (But the American oil companies wouldn’t allow that.)
I don’t dissagree. My view is that our journalists should strive harder to compensate for that particular being human problem.
Yes.
Still, not many want to do a 3 million barrel a day drop all at once, by surprise.
What level of criminal activity and violent acts against humanity would be reasonable and justified for the disaffected Sunni Arabs as they go at Maliki? ISIS is the militant face and fist of disaffected Sunnis. They are criminals and murderers. They are terrorists. ISIS is not a symptom of Sunni dissaffection with Maliki. They are terrorists taking advantage of Sunni disaffection.
Is signing a contract to sell F16s to a soveriegn government
‘Involvement’ or is it not.
Does Maliki have a point this morning in Iraq?
More specifically:
Obama is asking Congress for $500 million to train and arm “vetted” Syrian rebels.
This is shaking out into a multi-sided war like the Lebanese Civil War. The U.S. is still against Assad but also against ISIS. Iran is for Assad but against ISIS. And so on. It’s hard to see how that can end well.
Its less risky now since 100% of Assad’s CW arsenal is removed from Syria.
No doubt, but every side still has plenty of bullets.
And now it looks as if the non-terrorist rebels in Syria will be getting much more support now that the risk of CW falling into the hands of terrorists is now gone.