"A perpetual adolescent called to do a man's job."...
President Obama notified Congress on Monday that about 275 U.S. military personnel are deploying to Iraq to provide support and security for U.S. personnel and the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Obama also said the troops are equipped for combat and will remain in Iraq until the security situation becomes such that they are no longer needed. These forces are entering Iraq with the consent of the government there, White House press secretary Jay Carney said. He said the report to Congress is consistent with the War Powers Resolution. The Pentagon said 170 of the troops arrived over the weekend in Baghdad and another 100 were moved into the region to help with embassy security as some of the staff was being relocated in the area. The embassy remains open and operating.While the US embassy remains operating, the State Department announced on Sunday that additional security personnel would be added to the staff in Baghdad, though some of its other staff would be temporarily relocated. The United Nations also announced Monday that it has relocated nearly 60 of its staff from Baghdad to Amman, Jordan, according to Thomson Reuters. A spokesman for the UN indicated that additional relocations could be possible in the next few days. The news comes after insurgents have advanced in Iraq in recent days, and on Monday reportedly seized the northern city of Tal Afar, according to the NY Times.
I was right! I was right! I was right!...
Vice President Joe Biden predicted in 2010 that Iraq would be “one of the greatest achievements” of the Obama administration. Appearing on CNN’s Larry King Live, Biden told King “It [Iraq] could be one of the greatest achievements of this administration.” He continued, “You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government.”Here's the video: Paul Waldman of the Washington Post has a rather unique take on what's happening in Iraq:
The U.S. had tried to extend the presence of our troops past Dec. 31 [2011]. Why did we fail? The popular explanation is that the Iraqis refused to provide legal immunity for U.S. troops if they are accused of breaking Iraq's laws... But Mr. Maliki and other Iraqi political figures expressed exactly the same reservations about immunity in 2008...Indeed those concerns were more acute at the time...So why was it possible for the Bush administration to reach a deal with the Iraqis but not for the Obama administration? Quite simply it was a matter of will: President Bush really wanted to get a deal done, whereas Mr. Obama did not. Mr. Bush spoke weekly with Mr. Maliki by video teleconference. Mr. Obama had not spoken with Mr. Maliki for months before calling him in late October to announce the end of negotiations. Mr. Obama and his senior aides did not even bother to meet with Iraqi officials at the United Nations General Assembly in September. The administration didn't even open talks on renewing the Status of Forces Agreement until...a few months before U.S. troops would have to start shuttering their remaining bases to pull out by Dec. 31. The previous agreement, in 2008, took a year to negotiate.
Heavily armed Islamist militants flush with $450 million in stolen cash pushed toward Baghdad on Friday, sending thousands fleeing in fear from the Iraqi capital. Al Qaeda-linked insurgents who overran large parts of the north of the country earlier this week also seized about $450 million during a bank heist, Mosul Mayor Athier Nujaifi told NBC News. That makes the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) the world's richest terrorist group.The ISIS troops are led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (or Abu Dua) was once held by the US in Camp Bucca Iraq. al-Baghdadi was captured by U.S. forces in Iraq, but released by the Obama Administration in 2009. On his way to a visit to North Dakota, President Barack Obama held a brief statement and exchange with reporters on The White House lawn. Unfortunately for the President, events are deteriorating so fast around Baghdad, it may be too late for the United States to do anything before the ISIS/Sunni insurgents take the Iraqi capital. Reporters didn't ask specific questions about the failure of Obama to leave U.S. combat troops in Iraq after 2011 or his failure to complete a Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government.
Iraqi Kurdish forces say they have taken full control of the northern oil city of Kirkuk as the army flees before an Islamist offensive nearby. "The whole of Kirkuk has fallen into the hands of peshmerga," Kurdish spokesman Jabbar Yawar told Reuters. "No Iraq army remains in Kirkuk now." Kurdish fighters are seen as a bulwark against Sunni Muslim insurgents.
"The city of Mosul is outside the control of the state and at the mercy of the militants," an interior ministry official told the Agence France Presse news agency, saying soldiers had fled after removing their uniforms. Several residents told the Associated Press that the militants were now touring the city with loudspeakers, announcing that they had "come to liberate Mosul and would fight only those who attack them."Reports from Mosul detail mass beheadings of residents by the ISIS terrorists and a flood of hundreds of thousands of refugees out of the city. The al-Qaeda aligned ISIS organization now effectively controls a region from the eastern Syrian city of Raqaa, over the through the western Iraqi desert up to northern Iraq and less than 100 miles from Baghdad.
Insurgents seized control early Tuesday of most of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, including the provincial government headquarters, offering a powerful demonstration of the mounting threat posed by extremists to Iraq’s teetering stability. Fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an al-Qaeda offshoot, overran the entire western bank of the city overnight after Iraqi soldiers and police apparently fled their posts, in some instances discarding their uniforms as they sought to escape the advance of the militants... The collapse of government forces in Mosul echoed the takeover earlier this year of the town of Fallujah in western Anbar province, where U.S. troops fought some of their fiercest battles of the Iraq war...The Iraqi government is asking for international and/or US help, "by virtue of the Joint Cooperation agreement between the two countries." But that horse left the barn a long time ago. As a result of Obama's decisions regarding the Iraq pullout, there are not even any residual US forces left in the country, as remain in so many other places where Americans have fought and died:
In a new memoir of his time as secretary of defense in the Obama administration, Gates writes: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.” Oomph. Just to jog your memory, Clinton announced that she opposed the Iraq surge being pushed by President George W. Bush in the days leading up to the announcement of her presidential bid. She instead proposed a freeze in troop levels in the country and advocated for a troop increase in Afghanistan.... At one level, Gates's allegation is not at all surprising. Politicians factor in politics when making decisions? Gasp! .... But, remember this is Hillary Clinton we are talking about. And, the criticism that has always haunted her is that everything she does is infused with politics -- that there is no core set of beliefs within her but rather just political calculation massed upon political calculation. Remember that she began slipping in the 2008 Democratic primary when her opponents seized on an overly political answer on giving drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants during a debate in late 2007.
For the first time since the American troop withdrawal of 2011, fighters from a Qaeda affiliate have recaptured Iraqi territory. In the past few days they have seized parts of the two biggest cities in Anbar Province, where the government, which the fighters revile as a tool of Shiite Iran, struggles to maintain a semblance of authority. Lebanon has seen two deadly car bombs, including one that killed a senior political figure and American ally.
He just keeps saying it. “You know, Senator Chuck Hagel, when he was senator, Senator Chuck Hagel, now secretary of defense, and when I was a senator, we opposed the president’s decision to go into Iraq, but we know full well how that evidence was used...
The notion that Assad is only Syria's problem ignores the history of the Iraq insurgency, Lebanese assassinations, and the global Iranian-Hezbollah war against Israel and the United States....
The Washington Post endorsed Obama twice while noting a major foreign policy flaw. Why don't they acknowledge that they were wrong?...
Why not? The Kurds out number Palestinians several times over, and unlike Palestinians, have a real ethnic and cultural distinction from surrounding Arabs (and in Turkey, Turks). But for Europeans drawing lines on maps and Turkish national ambitions, there should have been an independent nation for...
"The gains of the surge are now in jeopardy ...
Dick Lugar touts his foreign policy expertise and influence, something which Brian Bolduc at National Review today finds is suspect. One thing Lugar does not tout is that he joined Harry Reid in 2007 in announcing that the surge in Iraq was not working and should be stopped. Reid's...
