Q: How do you spell “Iraqi Army”?
A: ARVN!
Defining attributes: Cowardice. Politically-selected officers who are incompetent. And probably the most ineffectual war-fighting since the French resistance to the Nazi invasion of 1940.
Actually, that’s doing somewhat of a disservice to the ARVN. Granted, the ARVN dropped their weapons and ran. But they ran from a superior invading force armed with tanks that their anti-tank weapons wouldn’t scratch, and were short of bullets because their logistics had collapsed. Past a certain point standing and fighting when it’s clearly futile just isn’t going to happen. So they ran.
In Mosul, two divisions of the Iraqi Army, approximately 30,000 men armed with tanks and helicopters and all the other gear of a modern army, were confronted by 800 ISIS Islamist guerrillas. In an act of cowardice that made the ARVN look courageous, they dropped their weapons and ran. Not because they were faced with a superior force. Not because they were short on fuel and ammunition. No. They ran simply because they were cowards who didn’t want to fight. The ISIS Islamist guerrillas are now in possession of over $1B worth of American-made weapons abandoned by the Iraqi Army thanks to this act of cowardice that makes the ARVN look courageous.
So the next question is, are we going to see another embassy roof evacuation? Well… probably not. While the Shia disbanded their militias when the Iraqi Army was formed, this “disbanding” was mostly in name only. They went home, but they still have their AK-47’s and RPG’s at home, and will be back in the field to defend Baghdad ASAP with support from Iran as needed. If ISIS attempts to enter Shia-controlled areas of Iraq, they will find themselves fish out of water and swiftly slaughtered.
Still, it appears we’re closing in on the de facto partition of Iraq into three areas — Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish. The Sunni area, it appears, is going to be under the heel of Islamists who make Al Qaeda look like sissies. ISIS is not going to try entering the Kurdish areas for the same reason they are not going to try to enter Shia areas — the Kurds never did disband their militias, since they never trusted the Shia-dominated central government.
The only good news out of this is that now that ISIS has seized over $1B worth of American-made arms, President Obama no longer needs to get Congressional approval to send over $1B worth of arms to the Syrian rebels. Who are, err, ISIS. Oh wait, this is supposed to be good news?
– Badtux the Deja-Vu Penguin
Still, it appears we’re closing in on the de facto partition of Iraq into three areas
Inevitable, & probably should have been done in 1991.
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The problem is that one of these partitions is going to be controlled by Iran, one of these partitions is going to be controlled by terrorists who make Al Qaeda look like girl scouts, and one of these partitions is going to be controlled by folks who annoy both the Turks and Iranians by blowing shit up in those respective countries from time to time.
We should have left Saddam in charge. He was neither an Iranian sympathizer nor an Islamist terrorist. But nooo, Saddam tried to kill Daddy, so Saddam had to be capped. Sigh.
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Tux, is it cynical to suggest that allowing the Sunni’s, Shiite’s and Kurds to squabble for a few decades might reduce the threat to us?
On the whole, perhaps a more adult approach to Iran IS the answer. Their “strict Islamic” regime is steadily loosening as their demographics change. We are still looking at them as the evil, hostage takers. We never have looked at why they hated us then (hint, think CIA, coups, partisan divisions, the British partition of the Middle East, etc). I suspect that if the US would try to allow various countries to work stuff out without strong-arming them into our idea of a solution, we might find better solutions that work for the world, just maybe not as nicely for us. But not so nice for us doesn’t automatically mean bad for us!
Why not allow Saudi Arabia and Iran as the “powers” in the Middle East? Oil isn’t the big stick it once was…it isn’t insignificant, but…
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I can’t imagine that allowing a terrorist refuge to fester is ever a good thing… sooner or later, *somebody* is going to have to go in and clean it out.
On the other hand, there’s a good case for that “somebody” to be someone other than ourselves…
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And in all of the coverage by the press, barely a hint of mention that this goes back to Darth and Chimpy’s Excellent Adventure.
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The McCainiac is trying to blame it on Obama. But the reality is that President McCain would have been forced to withdraw the troops from Iraq by now also, because the American people are just plain tired of that most excellent Iraqi adventure. Democracies are bad at that whole long term occupation and anti-insurgency thing. Eight years is about the limit. Beyond that, the populace’s attention span is exhausted and they vote in people who want the war over, already.
Which, you might notice, they did.
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Darth and Chimpy, haven’t heard that one in a while. I’ve started calling them Bush the Stupid and Dick the Sociopath.
The real questions are: 1) how does Halliburton make more billions and 2) how is this good for McCain?
We’ve had five consecutive preznits who have screwed up pretty much everything they touched, along with crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the constitution and mass murder. And Obama the Feckless has ramped up murder to include american citizens.
the US is fucking large portions of the rest of the world at the same time we’re fucking ourselves stupid.
What a way to go.
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Obama is somewhere to the right of Eisenhower. He reminds me of Richard Nixon. Not quite as twisted, but the same basic outlook on the world and the same willingness to do “secret bombings” albeit with drones rather than B-52’s. The hilarious thing is that the right is calling him “socialist” when he bails out bankers, bombs the crap out of brown people all over the planet (which usually sends them into mass ejaculations of ecstasy) and otherwise props up a failed capitalist system. Sheesh.
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The history documentaries of the future, when they discuss the Rise and Fall of the American Empire, will be using Yakety-Sax for background music. There will be a Godwin’s Law for descending so far as to accuse someone of being like an American.
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Have to agree. The past 40 years since the fall of Nixon have been a comedy of errors. Comedy gold is the same right-wingers who negotiated with Iranian terrorists whining about Obama negotiating with terrorists. Words fail.
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[…] Mosul fell, ISIS seized half a billion dollars in cash and over a billion dollars in war materiel. Is this a problem? Well, not really, if you follow the various enthusiasms of John […]
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According to a report in McClatchy, the Iraqis were merely following their officers. One soldier who fled from Mosul all the way to Nasariya said they did not leave their positions until they were told all their officers were already gone.
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Gotta love that inspiring leadership, eh? :).
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1. I’m good with the Kurds controlling their own territory and oil, You can do a deal with these guys,
2. The US and Iran’s boats should sail in the same direction mostly because the Saudi’s are in bigger trouble than most realize.
3. Nobody would care if these people didn’t breed over oil
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Nobody would care if these people didn’t breed over oil
That is the most cynical statement I’ve read in a long time. Also absolutely true.
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Tux, on my let them beat each other up theory. The Arabic World save knowledge while the West descended into the Dark Ages. Maybe this is the turn around. The religious fanatics driving sectarian battles while not valuing education and knowledge, just ideological purity.
I feel bad about people growing up in other countries not having basic rights or food, but we can’t police the world. I wish we could declare a Pax America and ensure all people have rights and food, but we can’t…we can’t even do that in ‘Merica!
As for the terrorist refuge, they’re about to start diverting their resources to destroying each other instead of us…I’m inclined to get the hell outta the way. The Saudi’s haven’t proven much value as allies, so maybe we slide over to the middle of the seat and let Saudi Arabia and Iran compete to stay on our friendly side, while we stay the hell out of the Middle East and stop giving the radical Muslim Imams something to complain about.
Yes, that leaves the Israeli question…we shouldn’t abandon them, but by supporting them we antagonize the Muslims. Maybe a behind the scenes meeting with a come to Jesus conversation (pun intended) about settle back to X borders and we will support you with all our forces, as long as you don’t provoke the Arabs…same with the Arabs, the Israelis pull back to X borderland we’ll support them against you, unless they decide to expand, then they’re on their own. Yea, it’s harsh, but Israel is a de facto apartheid state.
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I was watching a YouTube video recently of James “Clusterfuck” Kunstler giving a TRD talk. It was mostly about the monstrosity of American urban design, but he made a point that’s salient to the disappearing Iraqi divisions. His take was that if a nation is ugly enough, its citizens are not going to want to fight to defend it. You can scale that “ugly” up to more than appearances. If the leadership is venal; if the messages from the media are that “this land is a shithole” then why should a soldier decide it’s worth dying to keep it going? That’s how it worked for the ARVN, for the Iraqi army, and it might apply to the citizenry of the U.S. too. On the Right and Left, they’re being inculcated with the value that “Your country is being stolen from you by the blacks or the bankers or whatever group it is that your group hates.” So why would anyone give a rosy rat’s arse when the colonel leads a coup to overthrow those crooks in Congress?
One other similarity re: Iraq to the end of America’s Vietnam debacle — the Khmer Rouge. With people whose culture has been savagely mauled, there is a nihilistic “back to the primitive past” instinct. It’s like modernity has shown itself to be shit, so let’s roll the clock to the simpler times of our forefathers. Which the Khmer Rouge/ISIS fuckwits don’t truly comprehend, but it’s a nice pipe dream. Too bad their primitivovision entails killing anyone deemed too modern, or who doesn’t want to live in the neo-7th Century. Groups like ISIS and the Khmer Rouge end up eventually like a snake that eats its own tail, and fall prey to better-organised groups. The amount of suffering they spread before that happens is staggering, though.
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Chuin gets the credit for line three. Mahalo
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Line three of what? Who is Chuin?
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The “breeding over oil” comment is from Chiun in the Destroyer novels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Destroyer_(fiction)
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The Destroyer is still around?! My WW2-generation uncle bought “men’s fiction” of that ilk forty years ago!
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