This time in Ramadi, the capital of vital Anbar Province west of Baghdad. Ramdhi is a large city of between 500,000 and a million people, easily the biggest prize won by ISIS since the fall of Mosul last summer. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2015/05/17/266937/islamic-state-routs-last-elite.html This time the Iraqi officers weren't the first to flee. Apparently the commanders in the Anbar Operations Center ended up surrounded and under heavy attack, with only a few hundred troops defending them. All avenues of escape were cut off and their last communications said that 'Only God can save us'. Soon after that ISIS was announcing the fall of the Operations Center and today there are reports of mass executions of captives. The story in general resembles Mosul. Iraqi army units were fleeing in disorder, leaving behind hundreds of armored vehicles and heavy weapons. The Iraqi army's most elite special forces 'Golden Brigade' tried to enter the city, was repelled by ISIS fighters, tried to regroup at a stadium at the edge of town, was attacked again and fled. Meanwhile in the US, government spokesmen kept insisting that nothing unusual was happening and that if Ramdhi did fall, it would only be a minor setback. Everyone seems to think that happy-face approach is ludicrous. http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2015/05/18/3639583/experts-us-claims-ramadi-is-a.html http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/18/opinions/mansoor-isis-advance-ramadi/index.html The US refuses to confirm that the commanding general of US Central Command is in Baghdad, even though he has reportedly been photographed there.
They will need to change the national flag, a yellow stripe on a field of white. Yellow for cowardice and white for fear. The Iraqi Army is getting real good at dropping its weapons, turning tail and running. Maybe they need to adopt the Roman practice of decimation.
What is it about being trained by Americans and allied with America that destroys an army's willingness to fight ? This pattern goes back to the Korean War, without exception afaik.
And they want Americans to go there and help them on the ground. They can't be trusted until they stand and fight for themselves. They have no real leader that knows anything about how to lead or how to fight.
The glass parking lot option would solve the problem... just saying... >_> it isn't a good option though
Instead of giving the tanks, airplanes, artillery, helicopters, and guns to the Iraqi Army, so they can give it to their enemy, maybe we should just give them a good pair of Nike shoes and some nice Under Armour running gear. We would save a lot money.
I understand now that some of his generals are leading the ISIS group. Also there are 20,000 at last count ISIS members and over 2000,000 Iraqi military so why can't they overtake ISIS with a 10 to 1 ratio? Something is very wrong with the Iraqi military and no one is doing anything to set it straight as yet. Iraq is nothing more than a coward if it can't even ferret out the enemy that are now controlling another major city only 60 miles away from Baghdad. I also know those in charge of the government never tried to bring all political groups into their Congress which is why they can't keep good men in the military. There has to be a supply line coming from Syria so why can't anyone send a recon into that place and find out where and when supply trucks leave? That wouldn't take much courage to do and whoever does it doesn't even need a weapon if they are careful about watching. 'There's only one requirement for any of us and that is to be courageous. Courage, as you might now, defines all other human behavior.
Start enumerating differences: the ISIS fascists are motivated by their belief in a god that will reward them for killing people not like them. The Iraqi troops are motivated by their hope of a paycheck.
It puts Obama in a difficult spot. The current strategy of supporting the Iraqi national military isn't working. The Iraqi military is totally ineffective and seemingly unable/unwilling to resist ISIS. As somebody said, they are much better at manning checkpoints than fighting battles. The Shi'ite militias are slightly better, perhaps due to their religious fervor. They seem to be better at being scary thugs, terrorizing the Sunnis, than they are at fighting battles. Organization isn't their strength. They will probably be most effective defending Shi'ite inhabited parts of Iraq and the Shi'ite holy places. And some of these militias are very closely connected to Iran, trained and equipped by them. If their influence increases, Iran's influence increases. There are/were friendly Sunni militias too. The US supported them in past years when they decimated Al Quaida in Iraq, ISIS' predecessor. They have been crying out for US support in recent months, but Washington has been reluctant to arm them because they didn't want to support factionalism that might weaken the Iraqi central government. But that might be moot now. Anbar province was the Sunni militias' home and Ramadi was their stronghold. The mass killings that ISIS is conducting there probably include these people and their families. The most attractive group in Iraq are the Kurds. They are reasonably well organized and by local standards secular and tolerant. They are also dogged fighters. But again, the US has been reluctant to fully support and arm them, because the Kurds want independence and Washington doesn't want to encourage factionalism. Perhaps it's time for that to change. But even if we armed them to the teeth with heavy weaponry, aircraft and armor, it isn't clear that the Kurds want to launch a big and costly offensive out into Arab Iraq to free people that they don't really like a whole lot. The Kurds are more interested in defending their enclave from ISIS (and potentially Baghdad government) encroachment. The US arming a separatist Kurdistan wouldn't please Baghdad and might mean cutting ties with them entirely, pushing them into the arms of the Iranians. The Turks wouldn't be pleased either. Nobody wants to send large numbers of US ground forces back into Iraq. It isn't going to happen. There isn't any other Middle Eastern power that's willing to put its own ground troops in, assuming that they would be effective. The Iraqis probably wouldn't approve of that anyway. So, bottom line, there don't seem to be a whole lot of options.
Fear. ISIS have a very good record of instilling fear, what with videos of mass executions of captured soldiers, burning people alive in cages, throwing them off buildings, and all sorts of horrible things someone can do to another. They constantly release propaganda videos. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers and police officers have been massacred by ISIS. And a lot of it caught on tape and posted online. Iraqi soldiers are afraid. Because they are going up against an enemy that does not care if they are killed. It's all or nothing. They will not stop and they are happy to die for the cause in their scorched Earth policy. Sometimes it can be hard to face such devoted psychopathy, and when such individuals are armed to the teeth.. They don't care if they die. In fact, they want to die for the cause, to be martyr's. Then of course it was a predominantly Sunni city, and ISIS, with their propaganda, have played right into the hearts and minds of the local Sunni who felt they were being ignored by the Government and who felt they were mistreated by the Iraqi forces there. ISIS enter with promises of food, water, medicine and a better life. The Iraqi soldiers are not as well trained and they perhaps lack the hardware that could allow them to defend such cities. Sure, more boots on the ground is great, but without correct leadership, soldiers could just figure that going up against an enemy that treats death like it is a wonderful experience, is going to result in their dying instead.
The Iraqi military under Saddam was a huge million man monster, but it too was combat-ineffective. It should have sliced deep into Iran, when that country was in turmoil after the Islamic Revolution, but it stalled less than 100 km in. It successfully took Kuwait, whose vastly smaller military was caught by surprise and didn't fight back. Then Saddam's huge army was humiliated by the United States in the first Gulf War. It didn't put up any effective resistance in the second Gulf War either and Saddam was overthrown. The one thing that Saddam's security forces really were good at was keeping a lid on Iraq's own people. That's not an insignificant task, as the US learned after Saddam was gone and we found ourselves confronted with them. There's a lesson there that we probably need to learn. Namely that the rule of secular military-thug dictators in the Middle East isn't the worst thing that can happen there. There are far worse things, ISIS for one. Unfortunately the same pattern has been repeating throughout the region, cheered on and at times actively supported by precisely the same Western naivete that Bush and Blair displayed. Qaddafi was overthrown in Libya by an 'Arab Spring' uprising, supported by a large Western air campaign, and then that country immediately spiraled into being a Somalia-style failed state. The dictator of Yemen was forced out by an 'Arab Spring' uprising and the same thing happened. The Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt was forced out by another 'Arab Spring' uprising, this one cheered on by CNN on live TV. It was quickly replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, which in turn was replaced by another military dictatorship, which hopefully we won't be as quick to subvert this time. And now the drum-beat is to support the 'Arab Spring' uprising that arose to overthrow the certifiably brutal Bashir Assad regime in Syria and has succeeded in greatly weakening him while turning Syria into a close approximation of Hell on Earth, with nothing but dreams and fantasies as to what will fill the vacuum he leaves behind when he's gone.
Iraq's military was trained under American military commanders and learned about as much as that of the American soldier would know. After 10 years of developing the Iraqi military and giving them billions of dollars of weapons and gear now they can't even figure out how to take care of themselves. It's going to be a waste of time and American lives if America reenters the conflict with men on the ground there. This is exactly why I said to leave Iraq when Saddam was killed so that those left there could determine what their next step would be but alas they never got that opportunity and now we see just how bad things can get without American ground support. I sure would not want to have Iraqi cowards fighting with me for they would turn tail and run away leaving me to fend for myself. If ISIS ever gets total control those fighting for them are going to be in for a surprise when those in charge decimate their own ranks to gain more power through fear like Saddam did. Seems that's all most people over there can understand.
No it puts the Iraqi military and government in a difficult spot for it shows what cowards they all are by running away from a fight and not allowing other sects there to have a say in government affairs. The Iraqi government made a bad mistake by not letting others take part in the elections nor have anyone running for office in their Congress when elections were held. Better to help those , Kurds, that help themselves unlike who's in charge of Iraq now. At least we know that the Kurds will stand up and fight and win against ISIS when they are supplied with enough firepower to do so. Kurds are not cowards. Oh what a tangled web we weave when at first we deceive. America should not have stayed in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. That's where America went down the rabbit hole.
I'm going to diverge a little from Yaz here: I think we should indeed arm the Kurds to the teeth, and help them build a comprehensive society and industrial infrastructure, precisely because there's nothing else to do. Consider: like a zombie holocaust, ISIS will keep spreading across the ME until it bumps up against the national boundaries of Turkey and Iran, Jordan and Lebanon, and Saudi-controlled territory, and there it will stop excepting the usual cross-border skirmishes and general promulgation of hate and theocracy and all those things we despise on alternate days. Kurdish territory, as the last area within the pre-war Iraq, will be the final thing on their list of offensively breathing religious minorities - but it will be on their list and it will happen sooner or later. The zombies are going to start lurching off in that direction eventually, simply because it's the last place they can take without an international or solid local government backing them. And the Kurds, while tough, are none too well armed compared to the rapidly-abandoned armouries of Iraq. In arming the Kurds, it actually won't matter what the Iraqis think, because there won't really be an Iraq eventually - just ISIS and a few rump areas in Iraq/Syria. I'm really, really not in a kind of mood to see what's happening to religious minorities across the ME (and, shucks, who the hell predicted that one about three years back on SF who also happens to be a debonair and well-written fellow? just a-saying) happen to the Kurds too. They deserve a hell of a lot better than that. So - start arming them now. Get them a productive industrial system. They seem much more secular and enlightened, from this distance at least. Use that. Help them now. Work out an agreement with Turkey. Because, if we don't, and relatively soon, they'll go the way of the Armenian Christians just after old Ataturk gave up the ghost and the Islamists came a-calling. Strange, that parallel all over again, no? It's as though we collectively never learned anything. But surely that can't be so.
Thankyou - absolutely, this was so. Idiots the length and breadth of the blandosphere crowing about how things were going to change now when the Arab Spring came on, blithely ignoring those - like me - who predicted the Islamist Winter, as if the ability to thumb your way through a 140-character post on Twitter was somehow a binding contract to social progressivism. They reported the operators from time to time, but never made the obvious connections, even when it was right in their faces. There was the inevitable counter-punch, too, in complete disjunction with the realities of the event and its agents: oh, so you think human beings from Arab nations can't be called upon to protect themselves from the momentum of fascist movements? Why, you racist! Etc. Forgetting, you know, that other time it happened to those other more WASPy people from that state between France and Poland. You know, the funny little fellow with the Charlie Chaplin moustache. One of the more depressing things about that is that I am somehow expected to believe that none of them - not one - could call that one. Not one could see what was happening. So I am forced to conclude that either the drivers of our nations, of both wings, are either incurably stupid or devotedly obfuscatory. I think that was about the time that the gnawing on my own bland approbation for democracy really began. And neither is education a curative: it merely opens up a wider array of lazy false narratives to pick up on.
That's only the lesson if you forget everything that happened until five minutes before the latest uprising succeeded, including everything that happened after previous such uprisings succeeded in other places. The lesson is that installing and supporting military thug dictators in other people's countries is likely to bite us in the ass, and when people want to depose them we should help out, rather than propping up the thugs and beating up on the rebels. And that lesson could have been learned in 1915, rather than 2015. Only one wing, geoff. There's only one wing that fits your description there. Not "both wings".
I'm not going to argue with that. I agree, we probably should back the Kurds. I was just suggesting that they aren't likely to fill out a strategy of proxy-warfare, by replacing our plans for the Iraqi army and providing all the ground forces needed to defeat ISIS. I suspect that the Kurds aren't particularly interested in getting into bloody street fighting in Mosul, let alone pushing far to the west into Syria. Arabs will need to do that. And frankly, I don't see any Arabs at the moment capable of taking up that task. My impression is that ISIS doesn't recognize any national boundaries in the Muslim world. They are likely to honor Turkey's border for the time being, because the Turks are probably too strong for them to confront at the moment. But I fully expect them to lurch into Jordan and Lebanon if they can, seeking to devour brains (anyone with a sensibility more advanced than the 7th century). True. I think what the Kurds would like to do is build up their defenses. Not only against ISIS, but against attempts by the Iraqi government in Baghdad to reassert control over them. But I'm not convinced that the Kurds want to take the battle to ISIS in Mosul, Ramadi and Raqqah. I don't think that Washington is prepared yet to wash its hands of the idea of a unified Iraq and redraw the map. So from the White House's point of view, that's a major downside. If Obama is going to go the arming-Kurdistan route, he will have to change his thinking more than he wants to, I think. Turkey will loudly oppose it because they fear the effect of an independent Kurdistan on their own Kurdish minority. Saudi Arabia will oppose it because it will drive the Iraqi Shi'ites into the arms of Iran, Riyadh's rival. They are in a terrible neighborhood. If they were independent, their neighbors would be Iraq, Iran, Turkey and ISIS. None of those places can be considered friends of the Kurds and most are already military adversaries. (Iraq will be an adversary too, if Kurdistan declares independence.) Oil is their biggest product, but how will they export it? Who will give airlines over-flight rights to reach them? How will the US get military supplies to them? I doubt if they are all that enlightened if we saw them close-up. But relative to their neighbors (except maybe the pre-Erdogan Turks), they certainly are. The evidence of that is the fact that all the minorities that ISIS is slaughtering and enslaving are fleeing for the safety of Kurdistan. They are voting for what they trust with their feet. It's not going to be easy. The US seems to be assigned to figure all of this out while the rest of the world snipes at us. The EU can't/won't shoulder the burden of taking the lead in defeating ISIS (they already have plenty on their plate with Greece and Ukraine), and China just likes to brag about its new economic power while intimidating its neighbors but otherwise remaining a geopolitical non-entity. So there's a steaming brown anal extrusion right in the middle of Barack Obama's plate. He's facing one of those text-book crises where a world leader's response (or lack of one) can change the history of the planet. And he's facing that crisis without any attractive options.
Yeah, I'm sure the functionally illiterate American drone operator sitting in his air conditioned office dripping big mac on his shirt somewhere in the US who just murdered a family of fathers, mothers, and their children while they were celebrating a wedding is a f*cking God damn fearless Hero. Give me a break. The Guardian: Seventy-six children were murdered by one or two of our "Fearless Hero" functionally illiterate drone operators in two drone strikes. Oh well, f*ck-em right Joe? They need to paint a BIG yellow strip down their white flag as we wave our Made-In-China Red, White and Blue. Good ole' USSA where 'freedom' means you can be legally strangled to death if you resist arrest for selling your own 0.50 cent cigarette.
