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The ISIS Megathread

An affordable electric car for everyone cannot be mass produced fast enough. This is the best way for us to let them have their region back and rule themselves how they see fit. I know this is obvious to us all but it cannot be stated enough. And the comment about imperialism, no, its about controlling as much oil as possible much like Russia is trying to secure the North Pole to secure gas and oil rights up there as the ice melts from the Arctic. These are some wicked times and one more big crisis could trigger something very awful.
 
Bardeaux said:
What a great documentary, thanks for the suggestion!
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Seconded - thanks for that, in light of these recent developments, this doco is very revealing.

Wyld 4 X said:
An affordable electric car for everyone cannot be mass produced fast enough. This is the best way for us to let them have their region back and rule themselves how they see fit. I know this is obvious to us all but it cannot be stated enough. And the comment about imperialism, no, its about controlling as much oil as possible much like Russia is trying to secure the North Pole to secure gas and oil rights up there as the ice melts from the Arctic. These are some wicked times and one more big crisis could trigger something very awful.
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Imperialism is all about resources (in the past, the British empire conquered lands just to shore up supplies of suitable timber to build ships and maintain their naval superiority).
Being about oil (and strategic concerns) does not mean the wars/occupations by western nations over oil rich middle eastern countries is not imperialism. It's just imperialism that has morphed into something that looks different.
 
spacejunk said:
Imperialism is all about resources (in the past, the British empire conquered lands just to shore up supplies of suitable timber to build ships and maintain their naval superiority).
Being about oil (and strategic concerns) does not mean the wars/occupations by western nations over oil rich middle eastern countries is not imperialism. It's just imperialism that has morphed into something that looks different.
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No, it is not all about the resources, that is just a benefit (to the victors, go the spoils comes to mind) of maintaining control over a region. You cannot change the definition of a word to suit your position. If this is/was imperialism, then we have done the worst job in history of extending our influence in order to control what we believe to be is in our best interest. If you want a good definition of imperialism, just read anything that Russia has been doing lately (Crimea, Arctic, etc) since they are actually annexing/acquiring land with their recent actions.
 
The Russian expansions into the arctic? Resources.
Crimea? Strategic warm sea shipping.
If you think i am "chang(ing) the definition of a word to suit (my) position, all you need to do is look at recent history.
American imperialism is not the same as the sort of colonialism carried out 400 years ago.
Cultural and strategic imperialism is more subtle and nuanced than simply invading and stealing "the spoils" of war.
Wyld 4 X said:
If this is/was imperialism, then we have done the worst job in history of extending our influence in order to control what we believe to be is in our best interest.
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In my opinion, it is, and you have.
The Bush administration were some of the stupidest warmongers in recent history.
Up there with Nixon and Kissinger...
 
socko said:
i thought that part needed to be emphasized.
Everyone who supports and participates in the political and economic System that brought this on is complicit to some degree.

I'm also surprised that one person, Gertrude Bell, had so much influence in carving up the Ottoman Empire.
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so because i have a job and work hard for my money instead of hanging out downtown with my hand out makes me in some way responsible for some extremist groups actions halfway around the world? We cant control other people, even the ones close to us. We can only control ourselves
 
if were there or not, their still gonna blow each other up. Its time to leave. Plus, just the fact we stepped foot on the soil, the u.s. will be blamed for many years down the road for whatever happens there. I agree it was really bad how the govt. acted when we took over and disbanded the military. The intention wasnt to install a new govt there, it was all oil driven. It was quite obvious they had no clue what they were doing.

I mean how retarded but the killing is just gonna continue and nothing will stop it. Its never gonna be any different there. So let em kill each and blow themselves around till all thats left is a burning pile of ruble. god can handle the part of the world. Best part is this is all done in the name of God. Priceless. You wonder if there is other life out there in space looking at whats going on here on Earth and what they think about it.

We should pull back from everywhere and stop the senseless killing in the name of democracy. We need to build ourselves back up to the prosperious nation we can be and we should be. Like millions of other americans i have lost my pride and fear that things are just gonna get worse here. But anything can happen here and i would love to have pride from where i come from. But there needs to be a change from the people and the govt needs to change.
 
I wonder how much of the West's covert backing of the anti Assad forces has gone to ISIS?
 
Well that was close...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-17/militants-attack-baquba-iraq/5531042

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Iraq crisis: ISIS militants repelled after taking control of parts of Baquba, near Baghdad

Score of Iraqis have been killed after militants attacked and took control of parts of the central Iraqi city of Baquba before security forces eventually repelled the assault, army and police officers said.

The attack took place in the centre of the capital of Diyala province, and according to the officers, militants temporarily occupied several neighbourhoods.

The city, located just 60 kilometres north of Baghdad, is the closest the fighting has come to the capital since a major militant offensive swept down from the north last week.

Some residents and officials said the dead included scores of prisoners from the local jail, although there were conflicting accounts of how they had died.

The offensive, led by jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), but also involving others, including supporters of ousted, late dictator Saddam Hussein, have overrun all of one province and major parts of three more since it began late on June 9.

West of Baghdad, near Fallujah, the insurgents have shot down a government helicopter and said they destroyed several government tanks.

Militants have also seized most of the key Shiite town of Tal Afar in Nineveh province in northern Iraq, a government official said.

The fighting has killed dozens of civilians and combatants with security forces and civilian fighters holding parts of Tal Afar along a strategic corridor to Syria, according to deputy provincial council chief Nuriddin Qabalan.

Gunmen have also taken control of Al Qaim, the Iraqi side of a border crossing with Syria, after security forces withdrew, police and army officers said.

The gunmen are loyal to the rebel Free Syrian Army and Al Qaeda's Syrian franchise, Al Nusra Front, which already controlled the Syrian side of the crossing.

Al Qaim is one of three official crossings from Iraq into Syria.
 
bit_pattern said:
Gunmen have also taken control of Al Qaim, the Iraqi side of a border crossing with Syria, after security forces withdrew, police and army officers said.

The gunmen are loyal to the rebel Free Syrian Army and Al Qaeda's Syrian franchise, Al Nusra Front, which already controlled the Syrian side of the crossing.
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I'm finding it a bit hard to keep track of all of these militant factions, and who/what they supposedly represent.
What a fucking disastrous situation; as bad as anything those of us who campaigned against the invasion of Iraq could have invisioned.

Rather than bring "freedom and democracy" to the region, it has created a situation in which Al-Qaeda's stated goals - of creating a hardline Islamist empire - seems to be within the realms of possibility...but perhaps far more extreme than anything Al-Qaeda had invisioned (if media reports about ISIS are to be believed - which in this case there seems little reason to doubt such claims. These guys are not fucking around).

In the very least, many more innocent people are being killed and maimed, more chaos and devastation is unleashed upon the people of Iraq - and Syria - people who have already suffered so much.
A truly nightmarish situation.
 
spacejunk said:
I'm finding it a bit hard to keep track of all of these militant factions, and who/what they supposedly represent..
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Judean People's Front, the People's Front of Judea, the Popular Front of Judea etc...

Today's summary (link in post #30):

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Summary
As we continue our live blog coverage, here's a summary of where things stand:

• Iraqi forces rejected an Isis attack on a jail and police station outside Baquba, about 60 kilometers northeast of Baghdad. Almost four dozen Sunni inmates were killed in the incident under murky circumstances.

• Four bodies of young Sunni men were recovered in a Baghdad district controlled by Shia militias. Shia Muslims were reportedly leaving the capital, as the militias intensified their street presence.

• Iraq's biggest oil refinery, at Baiji, has been shut down and foreign staff evacuated after the plant was surrounded by militants. The military is still in control of the facilities, according to officials.

• Iraq's Shia-led cabinet has blamed Saudi Arabia for promoting "genocide" in Iraq by backing Sunni militants.

• Iraq's most senior Shia cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has sought to clarify an apparent call to arms issued under his name last week. Sistani's office said his followers should take up arms under the auspicies of security agencies.

• UK foreign secretary William Hague has announced that Britain's embassy in Iran will be reopened as the West looks to Tehran to help ease the crisis in neighbouring Iraq.

• President Obama sent up to 275 troops to Baghdad to guard the US embassy there. The troops were said not to fill a combat role but were "combat-ready."

• A Turkish court put a block on media reports of Turkish citizens kidnapped and held by Isis in Mosul. Turkey evacuated consulate staff in Basra in the south, Reuters reports.

• The UN's cultural organisation, Unesco, has urged Iraqis to protect the country's heritage in the wake of gains by Isis.
 
Neo-cons's naive dream to liberate Iraq explodes into nightmare
Date
June 17, 2014 - 11:59PM

It’s easy to see clearly in hindsight. But sometimes it’s worth looking back at what people foresaw. The current crisis in Iraq displays more starkly than ever the wilful blindness of the architects of America’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

“When Saddam Hussein and his regime are nothing more than a horrible memory, the United States will remain committed to helping the Iraqi people establish a free, prosperous and peaceful Iraq that can serve as a beacon for the entire region.”

That’s what Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defence in the Bush Administration, told the Iraqi-American community in Detroit in February 2003.

Wolfowitz was one of the most influential of that group of intellectuals and political activists who had, for 30 years before 2003, urged that America must use its military might to oppose totalitarian dictatorships. They had attracted the label “neo-conservative”. But the title of the Four Corners program I made about them, which was aired just a week before the Iraq war began, was “American Dreamers”.

Since the end of the first Gulf War in 1992, the neo-cons had been calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In the aftermath of 9/11, they seized their chance.

But it’s worth remembering that there were many within the US foreign policy elite who did not share the neo-cons’ passionate certainty – and whose doubts and warnings were ignored.

One of them was Dr Kurt Campbell, who would be Assistant Secretary of State during Obama’s first term and was one of Washington’s most experienced defence and foreign policy experts. Campbell was out of office in 2003, but he shared the views of the so-called “realists” within the Bush administration – among them, Secretary of State Colin Powell.

But the neo-cons and their hard right conservative allies, such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, had “won the battle for the heart and mind of the President of the United States”, Campbell gloomily told me.

They had convinced George W. Bush, first, that Saddam Hussein was a secret ally and protector of the al-Qaeda terrorist network. That, combined with its possession of weapons of mass destruction, they warned, made Hussein’s Iraq, as well as Iran and North Korea, hideously dangerous – “an axis of evil”, as the president had famously put it in his state of the union address a year earlier.

It turned out, of course, that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. It was obvious to many, too, that he was no ally of al-Qaeda. To claim the two were linked was, Kurt Campbell told me at the time, “almost clearly false”.

“I think al-Qaeda is fundamentally opposed to Iraq and ironically may actually support on some level the invasion of the United States because then it puts Iraq into play as a potential battle ground for Islamic hearts and minds.”

How prophetic. But neo-conservative Doug Feith, an Under Secretary of Defence with the might of the US intelligence community at his service, told me dismissively: “people who do not see the link are just not familiar with the evidence.” The “evidence” was illusory.

Many, if not most, of the millions who took to the streets in protest against the coming war believed that the talk of weapons of mass destruction was mere flannel, designed to conceal the United States’ true motive: to lay its hands on Iraqi oil.

There is no evidence now, and there was none then, that they were right. Both sides of the insiders’ debate in Washington poured scorn on the idea. What was really driving the neo-cons was something much more surprising: not cynical pragmatism, but an idealistic optimism that American power could be deployed for the benefit of the whole Arab world.

Paul Wolfowitz’s friend and academic ally, Lebanese-born Shi-ite Fouad Ajami, put it this way: “An idea is attached to this war, there is no doubt about it … it really is about the reform, not only of Iraq but … of the Arab world, an attempt to show the Egyptians and the Saudis and others that there is another way of organising political life.”

This was not mere rhetoric for the masses. The neo-cons believed it. And they had persuaded George W. to share the vision. In late February, he told the neo-cons’ own think tank, the American Enterprise Institute: “A liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region, by bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions.“

It was a beautiful dream. But to many, even then, it was extraordinarily naive.

The neo-cons, said Kurt Campbell, were not conservative at all: “one of the most powerful contributions that conservatives have made to our understanding of how to conduct foreign policy is not to overestimate consequences, don't be overly optimistic… if necessary be pessimistic… I think there is entirely too much optimism about what are the potential hopeful consequences of a major war in Iraq.”

When dreamers control armies, their dreams can be dangerous. But it tends not to be they who suffer, when the real-life nightmares arrive.

Jonathan Holmes is an Age columnist and a former presenter of the ABC’s Media Watch program.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/ne...o-nightmare-20140617-zsa7q.html#ixzz34uVkEjjZ
 
Hmmm. How times have changed - getting into bed with Saddam's Ba'ath Party to challenge Iran...now cozying up to Iran to...well, besides attempting to halt the advance of ISIS, it doesn't seem clear who is fighting for whom - and to what ends.

Frenemies indeed. What a fucking mess.

bit_pattern said:
It’s easy to see clearly in hindsight. But sometimes it’s worth looking back at what people foresaw. The current crisis in Iraq displays more starkly than ever the wilful blindness of the architects of America’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003
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It's really one of those occasions where making pretty accurate predictions ~12 years ago (when the drums of war were thumping away) is something I am not happy about.
So many people were dismissive when I (and many likeminded people) mentioned the utter catastrophe that would be unleashed upon the invasion of Iraq.
I sincerely hate to say "I told you so" - but these murderous "hawk" motherfuckers have only succeeded in strengthening militant fundamentalist Islam.
Much as the carpet-bombing of Cambodia in the early 1970s had the consequence of empowering the Khmer Rouge.

"There's nothing fair about loving war" to quote one of my heroes, Tuli Kupferberg.
 
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