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21  Other / Politics & Society / Re: The lessons of war? on: September 30, 2014, 12:19:05 PM
One more comment......And then there is this which doesn't just give lie to "won the red line fight" but also discusses the elephant in the room which is Iran, who is also busy moving forward on nukes, thankful we removed the sanctions that were actually having an impact: 


Assad Reported to Have Used Chemical Weapons Again
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/why-does-iranian-axis-get-pass_806123.html
You and I are largely in agreement on this issue except for the conclusion.

I mentioned Thomas Friedman, who is I think something of a regional expert on this. Here is his article:

 

LONDON — An existential struggle is taking place in the Arab world today. But is it ours or is it theirs? Before we step up military action in Iraq and Syria, that’s the question that needs answering.

What concerns me most about President Obama’s decision to re-engage in Iraq is that it feels as if it’s being done in response to some deliberately exaggerated fears — fear engendered by YouTube videos of the beheadings of two U.S. journalists — and fear that ISIS, a.k.a., the Islamic State, is coming to a mall near you. How did we start getting so afraid again so fast? Didn’t we build a Department of Homeland Security?

I am not dismissing ISIS. Obama is right that ISIS needs to be degraded and destroyed. But when you act out of fear, you don’t think strategically and you glide over essential questions, like why is it that Shiite Iran, which helped trigger this whole Sunni rebellion in Iraq, is scoffing at even coordinating with us, and Turkey and some Arab states are setting limits on their involvement?

When I read that, I think that Nader Mousavizadeh, who co-leads the global consulting firm Macro Advisory Partners, is correct when he says: “When it comes to intervening in the Arab world’s existential struggle, we have to stop and ask ourselves why we have such a challenge getting them to help us save them.”

So before we get in any deeper, let’s ask some radical questions, starting with: What if we did nothing? George Friedman (no relation), the chairman of Stratfor, raised this idea in his recent essay on Stratfor.com, “The Virtue of Subtlety.” He notes that the ISIS uprising was the inevitable Sunni backlash to being brutally stripped of power and resources by the pro-Iranian Shiite governments and militias in Baghdad and Syria. But then he asks:

Is ISIS “really a problem for the United States? The American interest is not stability but the existence of a dynamic balance of power in which all players are effectively paralyzed so that no one who would threaten the United States emerges. ... But the principle of balance of power does not mean that balance must be maintained directly. Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia have far more at stake in this than the United States. So long as they believe that the United States will attempt to control the situation, it is perfectly rational for them to back off and watch, or act in the margins, or even hinder the Americans. The United States must turn this from a balance of power between Syria and Iraq to a balance of power among this trio of regional powers. They have far more at stake and, absent the United States, they have no choice but to involve themselves. They cannot stand by and watch a chaos that could spread to them.”
22  Other / Politics & Society / Re: The lessons of war? on: September 29, 2014, 07:43:04 PM
Quote
    HH: And on that point, Dexter Filkins, you’re a very wide open critic of the Bush war, the never ending war, your first book. But buried in this article, not buried but in the middle of it, is a conversation with Mohammed Ghafar, a 28 year old soldier who said the army never functioned as well as he had hoped, and it grew much worse after 2011. He had respected the professionalism of the Americans, the training they offered, but, “Everything changed after the Americans left. The commanders steal everything, they sell it in the local market. It is true the absentee rate soared, the rations went bad.” In other words, America leaving in 2011 may have been the worst strategic decision of many bad strategic decisions over the last ten years.

    DF: It’s hard to conclude otherwise, you know, because that little, that quote from that deserter that I talked to in Kirkuk, I mean, you can almost say the same thing for all of Iraq. We left, the United States left in 2011. We went to zero, and we left. I mean, we packed up and left. So when you drive around Baghdad now, there is not a trace that the United States was ever there, and I mean apart from the American weapons, but in terms of like American presence andprojects and guidance, gone. And I think that we spent almost a decade there. We paid with a lot of lives and a lot of blood, and building, essentially, rebuilding the Iraqi state that we destroyed. And I don’t think it was ready. I mean, it just wasn’t ready to function on its own. And it couldn’t function without us. And actually, Ambassador Crocker, who was on your show, had a really good description of it. He said you know, we build ourselves into the hard drive of the place, and so we, the United States, were the honest broker. We were the only people that could sort of bring all the Iraqi factions together, and then we left. You know, and so the thing doesn’t work without us. And you can see that in Iraq at a micro level, like when I talked to that deserter, who said as soon as the Americans left, the commanders started stealing all the money and everybody left, and everything fell apart. Or you can see it at the macro level. I mean, that’s what’s happened to the Iraqi state.
It’s not the first time Filkins has reminded us about this. Last April, Filkins laid out the cost on the ground for leaving a power vacuum in Iraq:
Quote
    “We used to restrain Maliki all the time,” Lieutenant General Michael Barbero, the deputy commander in Iraq until January, 2011, told me. “If Maliki was getting ready to send tanks to confront the Kurds, we would tell him and his officials, ‘We will physically block you from moving if you try to do that.’ ” Barbero was angry at the White House for not pushing harder for an agreement. “You just had this policy vacuum and this apathy,” he said. “Now we have no leverage in Iraq. Without any troops there, we’re just another group of guys.” There is no longer anyone who can serve as a referee, he said, adding, “Everything that has happened there was not just predictable—we predicted it.”

    Indeed, months before the election, American diplomats in Iraq sent a rare dissenting cable to Washington, complaining that the U.S., with its combination of support and indifference, was encouraging Maliki’s authoritarian tendencies. “We thought we were creating a dictator,” one person who signed the memo told me.

    Less than twenty-four hours after the last convoy of American fighters left, Maliki’s government ordered the arrest of Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi, the highest-ranking Sunni Arab. Prosecutors accused Hashemi of having run a death squad that assassinated police officers and government officials. The practice was not uncommon at the time. “During the civil war, many political leaders in Iraq had death squads,” a former Western diplomat said. “Maliki started using the security forces to go after his rivals.” In moving against Hashemi, Maliki was signalling that he intended to depose his sectarian rivals.

    Hashemi flew to the Kurdish region, in northern Iraq, where officials offered to protect him. Seven of his bodyguards were arrested, the first of sixty. Only a few days earlier, in a press conference at the White House to mark the end of the American war, President Obama had praised Maliki as “the elected leader of a sovereign, self-reliant, and democratic Iraq.” When Hashemi fled, American officials did not publicly protest. Three months later, he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to death; he remains in exile.

    With the expulsion of Hashemi, Maliki began an aggressive campaign to crack down on dissent—especially Sunni dissent—and to centralize authority in his office. In the following months, he forced out a number of senior officials, notably Sinan al-Shabibi, the governor of the Central Bank, who had tried to stop him from diverting Iraq’s foreign reserves into the government’s operating budget. After the inconclusive 2010 election, the chairman of the Independent Election Commission was arrested. When the Integrity Commission uncovered a network in Maliki’s cabinet that was issuing government contracts to fake companies, he blocked the prosecutions; soon afterward, the commission’s director was replaced with a Maliki ally. In addition, Maliki created the Office of the Commander-in-Chief, which gave him personal control over the country’s million-man Army and police force, often requiring local commanders to report directly to him.

    As Maliki gathered power, he set out to banish every trace of Sunni influence from the bureaucracy. One of the places he began was the Iraqi National Intelligence Service. The director was an imposing former general named Mohammed Shawani, a Sunni whose three sons had been tortured to death by Saddam’s men. In August, 2009, Shawani told me, he went to Maliki with an intelligence report that detailed insurgents’ plans for attacks on several government offices. The Prime Minister brushed off his warnings, he said. (Maliki denied this, saying, “It is impossible to believe Shawani.”) Two days later, a wave of car bombs struck the Finance Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, and other government targets, killing a hundred Iraqis and wounding more than five hundred. Shawani fled to the United States. “I knew I had to leave,” he told me. “I thought I was next.” In the following several months, according to Shawani and former American officials, Maliki purged the service of nearly all its Sunni agents and analysts, some five hundred in total. “It’s essentially a Shiite organization now,” Shawani said.
Now the US wants to woo the Sunnis back into a coalition with Baghdad, but without putting American troops back into position as a guarantor of access. Filkins wonders what the American strategy is for victory against ISIS in Iraq. If it’s just air power, Filkins says, it won’t work:
Quote
DF: Well, yeah. I mean, I think the trick there, or the trouble is we’re not there. You know, we’re not on the ground. And so we’ve kind of seen this movie before. And you just alluded to it. And you know, during the Iraq war, the American war in Iraq, al Qaeda became the strongest insurgent group. And al Qaeda’s just a precursor to ISIS. And in fact, it’s the very same people. It’s basically the guys we didn’t kill. And you know, the Iraqis didn’t like them, and they rebelled against them, and they rebelled against the harsh kind of medieval religion that they’re imposing on everybody. They were offended by their brutality. And what did they do? They went to the Americans, and they said look, we’ll tell you where they live, let’s make a deal. And that was one of the great turning points of the war. And I think that there’s a pretty good chance that’s going to happen again, because I just don’t think the Iraqis are going to buy it. But the problem is that the United States isn’t there anymore, and so you don’t have that kind of firepower to take care of these guys. And what have you got? I mean, you’ve got the Iraqi Army, which you know, we’ve seen what they’re like. I mean, they’re a joke. And so I think, and if you couple that with the hatred that the Sunni Arabs have for the Maliki government, it’s tough. So the plan, I think, the White House plan is just to do it from the sky. And they can kill a lot of people from the air. But in the end, I mean, what’s the end stage?
And we may be about to make the same mistake twice:
Quote
    HH; Let me ask you, Dexter, you’ve spent a lot of time in Afghanistan as well. I had dinner last night with a Marine Corps major just back from Leatherneck, just finished his eight months there. He’s going home, he’s a reservist, and I don’t want to quote him. It’s just, I think we’re doing this again.

    DF: Yeah.

    HH: We’re going to see a replay of the collapse in Afghanistan of what we’ve seen in Iraq. Do you agree with that?

    DF: You know, I have spent a lot of time in Afghanistan. And I’m worried that you have essentially the same problem, which is a very fragile state in Afghanistan that basically we’ve built, and it doesn’t work that well, and it doesn’t work without us. And what that means, it doesn’t work without us, yes. You know, it’s just, and if we take the training wheels off, which is to say we leave, and we leave abruptly, I think we’re supposed to go to zero within a couple of years, yeah. I mean, I think there’s a great danger that you’re going to see something on the order of what’s happening now in Iraq.
23  Other / Politics & Society / Re: The lessons of war? on: September 29, 2014, 07:22:43 PM
outspoken war critic slams obama, withdrawing from iraq was worst possible action .... and its only going to get worse:
Audio: Iraq War critic says Iraq withdrawal may have been the worst strategic mistake of all
POSTED AT 3:21 PM ON SEPTEMBER 25, 2014 BY ED MORRISSEY

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/09/25/audio-iraq-war-critic-says-iraq-withdrawal-may-have-been-the-worst-strategic-mistake-of-all/


Dexter Filkins has long been a skeptic and critic of the Iraq war, from his tenure at the New York Times to his current assignment at the New Yorker. Still, that hasn’t kept Filkins from reporting honestly on developments in the theater; in 2008, while at the NYT, he wrote extensively about the success of the surge just a few months before the presidential election. A month later, Filkins wrote again about the “literally unrecognizable” and peaceful Iraq produced by the surge. Six years later, Filkins was among the skeptics reminding people that the Iraqis’ insistence on negotiating the immunity clause for American troops was more of a welcome excuse for Obama to choose total withdrawal — and claim credit for it until this year — rather than the deal-breaker Obama now declares that it was.

Yesterday, Filkins told Hugh Hewitt that while one can argue whether the 2003 invasion was ill-advised, the total withdrawal in 2011 was the worst strategic mistake made by the US:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nHy1EdnvGE
24  Other / Politics & Society / Re: The lessons of war? on: September 29, 2014, 06:55:11 PM
Lessons learned: We were safer under bush because he really did have al qaida on the run and without money to finance their terrorism. That leaving Iraq created a void that terrorist filled just like bush warned and the military predicted. And that IED's in the ME are preferable to IED's in America. BTW if you take the subways in NYC, they're the planned target for terrorist IED's.
I always appreciate your sense of humor, like the post above.

 "Safer under Bush". Wowee Skipper. Um, just to remind you it was Bush ignoring warnings that bought us 9/11 the greatest act of terrorism in our history. And it has been under Obama that zero acts of terrorism have happened on our soil. And safer under bush got hundreds of thousand of Iraqi's killed, millions displaced and nearly 5,000 of our young men and women dead.
Bush had what warnings of 9/11?  The FBI could not trace those that were  listed by the CIA.  So those that occurred in Bostow on 9/11 were not during the time this adminstration?  Shallow thoughts are obvious.  You do manage to keep the lies aout Araq. You do sound like one under the Sharia law.
As some other guy said once  in other thread  "they said it would be airplane attacks, but they did not say where" (paraphrase)

Yea, how silly of the enemy to not provide the flight numbers.
25  Other / Politics & Society / Re: The lessons of war? on: September 29, 2014, 06:34:20 PM
And as to Iraq it was Bush who set a timetable for withdrawal and  failed to secure a security agreement when he did so.  And it was Obama who followed the advice of the military to withdraw entirely without a security agreement.

As for Bush having el Qaeda on the run OMG that is funny. It was George who decided not to kill Bin Laden at Tora Bora and Bush who never killed ANY of el Qaeda.

 

And if you are worried about IED's in America then consider that there will always be terrorists and that risk is never going away.
26  Other / Politics & Society / Re: The lessons of war? on: September 29, 2014, 06:28:52 PM
Lessons learned: We were safer under bush because he really did have al qaida on the run and without money to finance their terrorism. That leaving Iraq created a void that terrorist filled just like bush warned and the military predicted. And that IED's in the ME are preferable to IED's in America. BTW if you take the subways in NYC, they're the planned target for terrorist IED's.
I always appreciate your sense of humor, like the post above.

 "Safer under Bush". Wowee Skipper. Um, just to remind you it was Bush ignoring warnings that bought us 9/11 the greatest act of terrorism in our history. And it has been under Obama that zero acts of terrorism have happened on our soil. And safer under bush got hundreds of thousand of Iraqi's killed, millions displaced and nearly 5,000 of our young men and women dead.
27  Other / Politics & Society / Re: The lessons of war? on: September 29, 2014, 06:05:50 PM
It's about an American general, billed as a "Colin Powell type" lolol, who is trapped in Afghanistan with a few SF men who were serving as his escort and he and they have to fight their way out. Very relevant to our own day. Very well written. Very much enjoyed.

Which brings me to the theme of this thread. I tend to agree that boots on the ground are stupid. We need to listen to Clausewitz. "War is an extension of politics by other means.".

Well, we're not really engaged in politics in these countries, as they all hate us, there's no real give and take between the US and our ME enemies. We don't really have a strategic goal, other than protecting our access to oil.

So, it is idiotic for us be involved in their internecine squabbles--if they want to kill each other rather than rebuilding their nation, that's fine by me. I regret the Smirking Chimp's dragging us to war there to make himself feel like a man (apparently, even that wasn't enough since he had to pad his flight suit...something tells that he needs a pair of tweezers to pee).
Here is the disappointing part.Suggest that thought be given to the trends and methods.  But of course that does require thought.  With just the slightest war buzz the Americans people sign up yet once again. wtf?
28  Other / Politics & Society / Re: 'Best solution’: Elderly Belgium couple plan joint euthanasia on: September 29, 2014, 05:05:54 PM
When I was 25, I didn't envision myself living past sixty;  now that I'm 47; my outlook has changed.  I think I'm rather typical, when you are young, the future seems to stretch on forever---  the older you get-- the quicker time passes,  and your remaining years seem pitiful short.  I hope that couple didn't leave anything to their wonderful children.
29  Other / Politics & Society / The lessons of war? on: September 29, 2014, 04:23:17 PM
War that never ends

The lessons of war in the Middle East seem all too far outside the grasp of American policymakers, pundits and elected officials.

From Iraq and Afghanistan, two wars most Americans now regret, there were potential truths to be discovered, lesson to be appreciated.

First, “boots on the ground,” in a geography where they enemy stands within the general population while hiding in plain sight, poses insolvable problems and dangers. This resulted in IED’s planted nightly and discovered daily by US forces, all too often a discovery by explosion. It also resulted in the “friendly fire” of those trained to serve in the local military turning on their American counterparts to kill from within.

Ultimately, in Iraq the successful policy was developed under General Petraeus, who fueled the Surge by hiring the militias who were fighting the US, many of whom were displaced veterans the US had disposed from their careers upon arriving in Iraq.

When US forces left, unable to secure immunity from Iraqi prosecutions by a security agreement, the payments ended, and the Iraqi army collapsed. Prime Minister Maliki caused that disintegration by replacing trained leaders with his loyalists and by alienating Sunni’s in the country with his actions to discriminate in all possible fashions.

Ultimately Iraq fell back into disarray, its present state. And today ISIS, created within Iraq initially as a local branch of al Qaeda by the US occupation, rose to represent the rejected Sunni’s in Iraq and the region.

And now the US re-engages to stem the flow of Muslim radicalism by organizing a coalition of partners to fight against ISIS. Already critics of the new policy argue that only boots on the ground will bring success.

But the facts are boots on the ground never worked in Iraq for many reasons.

For most of the stay of the American military Iraqi citizens disliked the American presence. Literally millions of Iraqi citizens were displaced, thousands killed in the war. The economy was destroyed, corruption was rampant, and the secular state constructed under Saddam Hussein was divided into religious camps, Sunni vs. Shiite.

The US left because Iraqi’s did not want us there.

The second lesson that could have been learned in Iraq is that Muslim religious division has existed for hundreds of years, and in its violent, primitive form of hatred, it shows no sign of abating. And nothing the US can or will do, boots or no boots, will change that hatred and create peaceful resolution.

Finally, the lesson Americans never seems to learn is that in the ginning up to war our leaders and our media do whatever it takes to excite Americans for war.

George Bush used the potential mushroom cloud; Barack Obama, the fear that ISIS will come to America and kill us here. Therefore, they must be destroyed forever.

But destroying ISIS will not destroy terrorism in the least, for like a Wack a Mole carnival game, wherever we crush terrorists they simply re-appear in other forms.

When we decimated al Qaeda’s leadership and killed Bin Laden, the terrorist threat hardly ended, it just re-shaped. If we destroy ISIS terrorism will again re-shape.

And terrorists will always target the US, always.

The only solution is from those within the Middle East, those nations affected directly by the brutality of radical Muslimism, to fight their own fight to preserve and protect their people and nations.

As Thomas Friedman recently wrote, what if the US just said NO?
30  Other / Off-topic / Re: Do You Believe The Bible To Be Historically Accurate? on: September 29, 2014, 08:30:31 AM
There are things many of us adults cannot understand, that some adults can do.  Do you understand how to put together a Cray computer?

And, we are all dust before Him who created the World by his Word.  It really is a silly objection, if one thinks about it.
And so is your objection to the objection! Zolace's way of explaining inexplicable things is to say "because" and he expects this to be seen as adequate.

Which indicates he is deluded.
31  Economy / Gambling / Re: DiceBitco.in | BE THE BANK ! | 1% House Edge | 7500+ BTC BANKROLL | INSTANT! on: September 27, 2014, 03:30:52 PM
I wanna leave the campaign and get paid what Im owed, since the campaign is no longer continuing and you closed with out saying anything u breached the contract please pay me, so I can move on
32  Economy / Services / Re: [FULL] DiceBitco.in Signature Campaign - Continued Again... on: September 27, 2014, 03:27:03 PM
Well they never said they are running the campaign and you have the bitcoins, so why can you pay what is owed so I can leave.
33  Other / Politics & Society / Re: RFK Jr. Overheats at Climate Change March on: September 27, 2014, 03:17:24 PM
Besides global warming is a bunch of bullshit dreamed up by anti-capitalist leftists, greedy scientist looking for grant money, and governments looking for another tax revenue source.
34  Other / Politics & Society / Re: RFK Jr. Overheats at Climate Change March on: September 27, 2014, 03:07:45 PM
Too funny.  RFJ, Jr. called out on his hypocrisy.  He doesn't like that and gets in the woman's face. Guess he is used to treating women like shit...last wife ended up committing suicide, thanks to her sleaze bag hubby. Glad to see this woman didn't back down to the hypocritical blowhard.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Overheats at Climate Change March

The last thing a really wealthy liberal wants is to be taunted about the energy use – and the resulting costs to the environment – required to support their lavish lifestyles.

But that’s what Michelle Fields of PJTV did to Robert Kennedy Sunday at the climate change march in Manhattan.

And Kennedy, who must be far more accustomed to worshipful ass kissing, didn’t like it much, sticking his hands in Fields’s face and even at one point grabbing her microphone. She didn’t back away a bit, but presumably ended the interview at that point lest he launch a one man war on women against her.

Video....  http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2014/09/22/robert-kennedy-jr-overheats-climate-change-march/
These elitist live in their mansions, drive around in their big cars, fly wherever and whenever they want. The carbon footprints of these hypocritical elitists are ten times that of a normal American's footprint. Do you really think these rich phucks are going to give up their pandered lifestyle to save the planet. I'll start listening to assholes like Kennedy, Gore, DiCaprio, etc when they start living like Ed Begley. Till then they can go phuck themselves.
35  Economy / Services / Re: Make 250$ for a little work on: September 26, 2014, 10:26:47 PM
i know what ur doing, its called a chargeback and the ones who pay are the company that send out the items. dont do this scam with him or u can regret it
36  Economy / Service Discussion / Re: XAPO debit card on: September 26, 2014, 10:01:54 PM
me too place an order 3 months ago and even did the facebok and twitter advertising. I wont put any btc with them till they send me the card
37  Economy / Services / Re: [FULL] DiceBitco.in Signature Campaign - Continued Again... on: September 26, 2014, 02:34:59 PM
Why u not answering?
I send your question to Dooglus, but, as you can see, he hasn't answered yet. I can't help you out, because Dooglus runs the campaign at this moment (or DiceBitco.in, no idea).


Thank you for the reply, I had pm also
38  Economy / Services / Re: Pocket Dice Signature Campaign on: September 26, 2014, 02:15:38 PM
Something which I can't find in the FAQ:
When will the first payout happen?
Since we've started our campaign on Wednesday, we plan to make first payouts on next Wednesday.

hey Can I reserve a spot in the next 4 days ill be free?
We don't have reservation, but in the next 4 days will start the next week of campaign, so we think you'll be able to join with no problem.

This means ur opening more slots?  or u getting rid of people?
39  Economy / Services / Re: [FULL] DiceBitco.in Signature Campaign - Continued Again... on: September 26, 2014, 02:12:34 PM
Why u not answering?
40  Economy / Services / Re: Pocket Dice Signature Campaign on: September 26, 2014, 02:11:01 PM
hey Can I reserve a spot in the next 4 days ill be free?
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