Obama Calls Iraq "Long Term Project"; US Bombs Its Own Weapons; "These People Are Coming Here" Says Senator Graham

Total Failure

Senator McCain and others want to send more weapons to Iraq, as we bomb US weapons already there (but now in hands of Isis).

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton blames Obama for not sending weapons to Syrian moderates, even though we did train Syrian rebels in Jordan.

Intervention, past and present, has been a total failure.

US Bombs Its Own Weapons

Let's tie the above thoughts together starting with The US Bombing Its Own Guns Perfectly Sums Up America’s Total failure in Iraq.

In the decade since the 2003 US-led Iraq invasion, the US has spent a fortune training and arming the Iraqi army in the hopes of readying it to secure the country once America left. That meant arming the Iraqi army with high-tech and extremely expensive American-made guns, tanks, jeeps, artillery, and more. 

But the Iraqi army has been largely a failure. When ISIS invaded northern Iraq from Syria in June, the Iraqi forces deserted or retreated en masse. Many of them abandoned their American equipment. ISIS scooped it up themselves and are now using it to rampage across Iraq, seizing whole cities, terrorizing minorities, and finally pushing into even once-secure Kurdish territory. All with shiny American military equipment.

So the US air strikes against ISIS are in part to destroy US military equipment, such as the artillery ISIS has been using against Kurdish forces. The absurdity runs deep: America is using American military equipment to bomb other pieces of American military equipment halfway around the world.

The American weapons the US gave the Iraqi army totally failed at making Iraq secure and have become tools of terror used by an offshoot of al-Qaeda to terrorize the Iraqis that the US supposedly liberated a decade ago. And so now the US has to use American weaponry to destroy the American weaponry it gave Iraqis to make Iraqis safer, in order to make Iraqis safer.

It keeps going: the US is intervening on behalf of Iraqi Kurds, our ally, because their military has old Russian-made weapons, whereas ISIS, which is America's enemy, has higher-quality American weapons. "[Kurdish forces] are literally outgunned by an ISIS that is fighting with hundreds of millions of dollars of U.S. military equipment seized from the Iraqi Army who abandoned it," Ali Khedery, a former American official in Iraq, told the New York Times.

Hillary Blames Obama

Hillary Clinton is in a desperate attempt to distance herself from president Obama in 2016 presidential bid. Her strategy has been to side with McCain regarding Obama's failure to send more weapons to "moderates" in Syria attempting to overthrow Syrian president Bashar Hafez al-Assad.

The Financial Times reports Clinton Takes Swipe at Obama Over Syria

Washington’s failure to arm the Syrian rebels contributed directly to the rapid rise of the Islamic militants now taking over large swaths of northern Iraq, according to Hillary Clinton, the former US secretary of state.

“I know that the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against (Syrian President Bashar al-Assad) – there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle – left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Mrs Clinton said.

Civil War Hypocrisy

Apparently it's OK for the US to get involved in a civil war half-way around the world but it's not OK for Russia to get involved in a civil war on it's own doorstep.

And contrary to stated opinion of Clinton, one can make a case we got too involved in Syria, with a secret training base in Jordan.

Syria Blowback 

Please consider Blowback! U.S. trained Islamists who joined Isis

Syrian rebels who would later join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or Isis, were trained in 2012 by U.S. instructors working at a secret base in Jordan, according to informed Jordanian officials.

The officials said dozens of future Isis members were trained at the time as part of covert aid to the insurgents targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The officials said the training was not meant to be used for any future campaign in Iraq.

In February 2012, WND was first to report the U.S., Turkey and Jordan were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country’s northern desert region.

Last March, the German weekly Der Spiegel reported Americans were training Syrian rebels in Jordan.

According to Hillary (and senator McCain) things would have turned out better if only we trained more rebels and gave them more military equipment as well.

Don't worry, those weapons never would have gotten into Isis hands, even though it happened. These clowns claim to predict the future when they cannot even predict the past.
  
Long-Term Mission

Today president Obama said The strikes against militants will be a “long-term project.”

The administration’s actions drew stepped-up criticism from Republican lawmakers today, who on the Sunday network talk shows accused the president of doing too little, too late against a widening terrorist threat.

“Mr. President, if you don’t adjust your strategy, these people are coming here,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican on the Armed Services Committee.

“If you don’t hit them in Syria, you’ll never solve the problem in Iraq,” Graham said.

Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said the strikes are “clearly very, very ineffective to say the least,” as Islamic State “continues to make gains everywhere.” McCain urged airstrikes against Islamic State in Syria, sending aid to the Free Syrian Army, better training for the Kurds in Iraq and sending more military equipment to Erbil.

“This is turning into, as we had predicted for a long time, a regional conflict which does pose a threat to the security of the United States of America,” McCain said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program.

Regional Conflict

Note the irony in McCain's "prediction" about a regional crisis.

Yes it has, and McCain, Clinton, and all the idiots who supported  the war in Iraq are to blame.

"These People Are Coming Here"

Senator Graham stepped up the warmonger plate and smashed a home run straight away center field with his comment "These people are coming here".

That's always a popular slogan to ignite fear and support for war. And it works every time too.

Goering at the Nuremberg Trials

Please recall what Reichsmarschall Hermann Wilhelm Göring (in English his name is also spelled as Hermann Goering) Nazi founder of the Gestapo, Head of the Luftwaffe, said at the Nuremberg Trials.

Here is a clip of the interview in Goering's cell in prison, after the war.

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Follow the Money

Raúl Ilargi says Follow The Money All The Way To The Next War

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism had some pertinent comments in her reply Ilargi: Follow The Money All The Way To The Next War.

What is the evidence behind US claims of Russian responsibility for the downing of MH17? After Colin Powell’s Iraq WMD canard, it’s remarkable that anyone accepts “trust me” from American officials, but remarkably, that’s where things stand.

One excuse offered for the failure of the US to support its claims is that the military apparatus does not want to expose its information-gathering capabilities. But there’s another, more obvious reason. The officialdom does not want to establish the precedent of being required to deliver the goods in order to foment war. That would mean they’d be expected to do so in the future, and the failure to be forthcoming would be seen as a sign that the officialdom was making stuff up. Needing to establish the legitimacy of their case would constrain their game.

Who Needs Evidence?

Evidence? Who needs evidence when you have the "Bush Doctrine" of preemptive strikes.

The phrase "Bush Doctrine" was rarely used by members of the Bush administration. The expression was used at least once, though, by Vice President Dick Cheney, in a June 2003 speech in which he said, "If there is anyone in the world today who doubts the seriousness of the Bush Doctrine, I would urge that person to consider the fate of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq."

Yes, Dick Cheney, let's all consider the fate of Iraq and the effectiveness of the "Bush Doctrine" of using trumped up evidence, lies, deceit, and torture, and preemptive warfare resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, and the formation of Isis in the wake of that failure.

Prepare for War

Prepare for war. Possibly on multiple fronts. But don't worry, war is a "small price to pay".

• "Small Price to Pay"  
• Scathing Anti-West Editorial in German Handelsblatt; Reader Emails on "Small Price to Pay"

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com