IRAQ

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

I guess the words “told you so” are appropriate in view of what has occurred in Iraq over the past 24 hours.

The funny thing (in a farcical sense) is that Iraq never had a jihadist problem before the Americans went warmongering in that country because Dubya's imaginary god inside his head told him to invade Iraq. For all of his numerous faults, Saddam Hussein kept the lid on those extremist religious nutters who are now taking over vast areas of the country.

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

• Insurgents in northern Iraq seize key cities, advance toward Baghdad

          (The Washington Post — 6:27PM EDT, Wednesday, June 11, 2014)


An image taken from a propaganda video uploaded by jihadist group the Islamic State of Iraq
and the Levant (ISIL) allegedly shows ISIL militants gathering at an undisclosed location in
Iraq’s Nineveh province. Militants took control of the Iraqi city of Tikrit and freed hundreds
of prisoners today, police said, the second provincial capital to fall in two days.
 — Photo: AFP/Getty Images.

[guest49]

By George, I think he's done it!

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

Its the American and NATO reward for supporting Al Qaeda in Syria and now they are losing their control of the oil and their reserve banking system they worked so hard to set up lol.

All caused by the dysfunctional New World Dis-Order

[donquixotenz]

All financed and armed by the Iranese aotollah's and the ruskies...  ww3 not far away and the ruskies are setting up for European land grab whilst the rest of the world fights to survive the jihadists blitzkrieg.. mark my words nuclear weapons will be deployed in the next few years and then amageddon....

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

All financed and armed by the Iranese aotollah's...

Not quite correct.

The jihadist mob running amok in Iraq are Sunni Muslims. Iranians are Shiites. They are sworn enemies.

The majority of the population in Iraq are actually Shiites. Under Saddam, they were suppressed by a minority. The Shiites control the official Iraqi government because of their voting numbers and they are the ones more sympathetic to Iran. Shiites are also sympathetic to the dictator president of Syria. The Sunnis who are attempting to overthrow both the Syrian government and the Iraqi government have more in common with Saudi Arabia than any other grouping. And the Americans are in bed with the Saudis. I can see Iran pouring support into Iraq on the side of the government if this jihad starts taking over too much of the country, just like they have done on the side of the government in Syria.

But whatever.....Iraq was a brutal dictatorship under Saddam, but at least he kept the lid on those extremist religious nutters of both Shiite and Sunni persuasion. Since the Americans went blundering in there, the lid has come off and the shit was hitting the fan while the Americans were still there. That was one of the reasons why the Americans buggered off....they had let the genie out of the bottle and they didn't have the bottle to deal with it, so they went running off back home, leaving a mess behind that is threatening to overwhelm the entire Middle East.

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

Oh dear now A-Q have captured ton of high tech US weapons.



Iraq delays vote on emergency as crisis spreads

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-27813239

[donquixotenz]

Not quite correct.

stand corrected but no matter it's a bloody mess and no good will come of it despite outside interests involvement for pure greed for the control of the oil and its infrastructure the fanaticisim will eventually decimate the east and northern Africa and religious fanacisim will be the winner and the free world will suffer

[guest49]

'They lined the streets with the decapitated heads of police and soldiers': Iraqi refugee reveals the horrors of the jihadi takeover as Baghdad vows to fight back

U.S. today changed tone on intervention; President Obama said: 'I don't rule out anything... Iraq will need more help'
Crucial vote to grant emergency powers was delayed because MPs did not turn up, leaving Iraqi government paralysed
Disruption in Iraq could add 2p to the price of a litre of petrol within a fortnight as insurgents take key oil fields
Kurdish forces are in full control of Iraq's oil city of Kirkuk after the federal army abandoned their posts

Iran has sent special forces and a unit of elite troops to Iraq to assist the Iraqi government halt the advance
Iraqi air force is bombing insurgent positions in and around Mosul - 1.3million citizens still remain in the city
Middle East experts raised the prospect of Iraq being carved into three - Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite - by the conflict


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2655977/ISIS-militants-march-Baghdad-trademark-bullet-head-gets-way-control-north.html#ixzz34SrjvMJv

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

SAUDI ARABIA, SUNNI CALIPHATE, NATO RUN SECRET TERROR ARMY IN IRAQ AND SYRIA
The ultimate objective is taking down all contenders and reconfiguring the world order

http://www.infowars.com/saudi-arabia-sunni-caliphate-nato-run-secret-terror-army-in-iraq-and-syria/

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

Photos said to show jihadists executing Iraq troops

http://news.yahoo.com/photos-said-show-jihadists-executing-iraq-troops-114750726.html;_ylt=AwrBEiRkt51TTjsAHSzQtDMD

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

               (click on the cartoon to read an interesting news story)

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from the Los Angeles Times....

Iraq: U.S. broke it but now someone else needs to own it

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PDT - Wednesday, June 18, 2014



JUST a few months after America got sideswiped by the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, I was in Brussels at a gathering of foreign correspondents where the focus of discussion was our suddenly more dark and dangerous world.

During a cocktail hour, I had the opportunity to chat with Bill Kristol, the neoconservative commentator and editor of the Weekly Standard. We got into a discussion about American imperialism and Kristol quite forthrightly said he considered imperialism a good thing. Someone needed to run the world and shape the future and, in Kristol’s view, because only Americans had the power and principles to do it right, empire was both a necessity and a duty.

At the time, I was not aware of how men who shared Kristol’s view — specifically, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz — were making plans to extend the U.S. imperium by invading Iraq to depose the tyrant Saddam Hussein. It seems likely that Kristol had a much better sense of what was in the works and was jubilant about the prospect.

Now Kristol is back on the news talk shows making the case for sending American forces back into Iraq to counter the alarming battlefield success of forces from the ultra-violent, ultra-radical group calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). After spending a trillion tax dollars attempting to rebuild and reshape a conquered land, after 4,500 American soldiers have been killed and tens of thousands wounded, the U.S. is watching Iraq rapidly descend into chaos and religious war. Kristol and his neoconservative compatriots insist that this is not an acceptable ending to their imperial adventure.

Unlike 2002, though, Kristol and friends do not seem nearly as smart as they once did. From his vehement reiteration of the George W. Bush administration’s bogus claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction to his certainty in 2008 that Sarah Palin was eminently qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, Kristol, over the last decade, has been wrong far more than he has been right.

Twelve years ago, the neoconservatives dreamed that the Islamic world was ripe for democracy, needing only a push from the American military and a lot of not-so-free advice from free-market enthusiasts fresh out of conservative think tanks. That illusion proved to be laughingly naive. Like the Ottoman rulers before him, the grim despot Hussein was keeping a tight lid on religious and ethnic divisions that had festered and occasionally flared in the Islamic world for more than 1,000 years. The American invasion blew off that lid. A reintroduction of U.S. troops now cannot put the genie of hate back in the bottle.

This truly is not America’s fight. Though we must do whatever we can through diplomacy to contain the damage and encourage any tendency toward rationality and reconciliation, we do not need to send any more young Americans to die in a conflict older than America itself.

Back when the neoconservatives were pushing President George W. Bush toward a war with Iraq, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell reminded the president of what he called the Pottery Barn rule: “You break it, you own it”. Well, the U.S. did break it, but Americans have paid more than enough in blood and treasure to cover the cost of damage done. Whatever happens from this point forward someone else will have to own.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-iraq-us-broke-it-20140618-story.html

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Tom Engelhardt: The Guns of Folly

posted at 7:57AM - Thursday, June 19, 2014 | TomDispatch.com

______________________________________

Who Won Iraq?

Lost Dreams, Lost Armies, Jihadi States, and the Arc of Instability

By Tom Engelhardt

AS Iraq was unraveling last week and the possible outlines of the first jihadist state in modern history were coming into view, I remembered this nugget from the summer of 2002. At the time, journalist Ron Suskind had a meeting with “a senior advisor” to President George W. Bush (later identified as Karl Rove).  Here’s how he described part of their conversation:

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’, which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality’. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That's not the way the world really works anymore’, he continued. ‘We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.”

As events unfold increasingly chaotically across the region that officials of the Bush years liked to call the Greater Middle East, consider the eerie accuracy of that statement. The president, his vice president Dick Cheney, his defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and his national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, among others, were indeed “history’s actors”. They did create “new realities” and, just as Rove suggested, the rest of us are now left to “study” what they did.

And oh, what they did! Their geopolitical dreams couldn’t have been grander or more global. (Let’s avoid the word “megalomaniacal”.)  They expected to pacify the Greater Middle East, garrison Iraq for generations, make Syria and Iran bow down before American power, “drain” the global “swamp” of terrorists, and create a global Pax Americana based on a military so dominant that no other country or bloc of countries would ever challenge it.

It was quite a dream and none of it, not one smidgen, came true. Just as Rove suggested they would — just as in the summer of 2002, he already knew they would — they acted to create a world in their image, a world they imagined controlling like no imperial power in history. Using that unchallengeable military, they launched an invasion that blew a hole through the oil heartlands of the Middle East. They took a major capital, Baghdad, while “decapitating” (as the phrase then went) the regime that was running Iraq and had, in a particularly brutal fashion, kept the lid on internecine tensions.

They lacked nothing when it came to confidence. Among the first moves of L. Paul Bremer III, the proconsul they appointed to run their occupation, was an order demobilizing Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein’s 350,000-man army and the rest of his military as well. Their plan: to replace it with a lightly armed border protection force — initially of 12,000 troops and in the end perhaps 40,000 — armed and trained by Washington. Given their vision of the world, it made total sense. Why would Iraq need more than that with the U.S. military hanging around for, well, ever, on a series of permanent bases the Pentagon's contractors were building? What dangers could there be in the neighborhood with that kind of force on hand? Soon enough, it became clear that what they had really done was turn the Iraqi officer corps and most of the country’s troops out onto unemployment lines, creating the basis for a militarily skilled Sunni insurgency. A brilliant start!

Note that these days the news is filled with commentary on the lack of a functional Iraqi air force. That’s why, in recent months, Prime Minister Maliki has been calling on the Obama administration to send American air power back into the breach. Saddam Hussein did have an air force. Once it had been one of the biggest in the Middle East. The Bush administration, however, came to the conclusion that the new Iraqi military would have no need for fighter planes, helicopters, or much of anything else, not when the U.S. Air Force would be in the neighborhood on bases like Balad in Central Iraq. Who needed two air forces?

Be Careful What You Wish For

It was all to be a kind of war-fighting miracle. The American invaders would be greeted as liberators, the mission quickly accomplished, and “major combat operations” ended in a flash — as George Bush so infamously announced on May 1st, 2003, after his Top Gun landing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. No less miraculous was the fact that it would essentially be a freebie. After all, as undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz pointed out at the time, Iraq “floats on a sea of oil”, which meant that a “liberated” country could cover all “reconstruction” costs without blinking.

The Busheviks entered Iraq with a powerful sense that they were building an American protectorate. So why wouldn't it be a snap to carry out their ambitious plans to privatize the Iraqi economy, dismantle the country’s vast public sector (throwing another army of employees out of work), and bring in crony corporations to help run the country and giant oil companies to rev up the energy economy, lagging from years of sanctions and ill-repair? In the end, Washington’s Iraq would — so they believed — pump enough crude out of one of the greatest fossil fuel reserves on the planet to sink OPEC, leaving American power free to float to ever greater heights on that sea of oil. As the occupying authority, with a hubris stunning to behold, they issued “orders” that read as if they had been written by officials from some nineteenth-century imperial power.

In short, this was one for the history books. And not a thing — nothing — worked out as planned. You could almost say that whatever it was they dreamed, the opposite invariably occurred. For those of us in the reality-based community, for instance, it’s long been apparent that their war and occupation would cost the U.S., literally and figuratively, an arm and a leg (and that the costs to Iraqis would prove beyond calculating). More than two trillion dollars later — without figuring in astronomical post-war costs still to come — Iraq is a catastrophe.

And $25 billion later, the last vestige of American Iraq, the security forces that, in the end, Washington built up to massive proportions, seem to be in a state of dissolution. Just over a week ago, faced with the advance of a reported 800-1,300 militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the opposition of tribal militias and local populations, close to 50,000 army officers and troops abandoned their American weaponry to Sunni insurgents and foreign jihadis, shed their uniforms by various roadsides, and fled. As a result, significant parts of Iraq, including Mosul, its second largest city, fell into the hands of Sunni insurgents, some of a Saddamist coloration, and a small army of jihadis evidently funded by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, both U.S. allies.

The arrogance of those occupation years should still take anyone’s breath away. Bush and his top officials re-made reality on an almost unimaginable scale and, as we study the region today, the results bear no relation to the world they imagined creating. None whatsoever. On the other hand, there were two dreams they had that, after a fashion, did come into existence.

Many Americans still remember the Bush administration’s bogus pre-invasion claims — complete with visions of mushroom clouds rising over American cities — that Saddam Hussein had a thriving nuclear program in Iraq. But who remembers that, as part of the justification for the invasion it had decided would be its destiny, the administration also claimed a “mature and symbiotic” relationship between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al-Qaeda? In other words, the invasion was to be justified in some fashion as a response to the attacks of 9/11 (which Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with). Who remembers that, the year after American troops took Baghdad, evidence of the nuclear program having gone down the toilet, Vice President Dick Cheney, backed by George W. Bush, doubled down on the al-Qaeda claim?
“There clearly was a relationship. It's been testified to,” said the vice president on CNBC in June 2004. “The evidence is overwhelming. It goes back to the early '90s. It involves a whole series of contacts, high-level contacts with Osama bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence officials.” Based on cherry-picked intelligence, such claims proved fraudulent, too, or as David Kay, the man assigned by the administration to hunt down that missing weaponry of mass destruction and those al-Qaeda links, put it politely, “evidence free”.  By then, however, 57% of Americans had been convinced that there was indeed some significant relationship between Saddam’s Iraq and al-Qaeda, and 20% believed that Saddam was linked directly to the 9/11 attacks.

Be careful, as they say, what you wish for. More than a decade after its invasion and occupation, after Cheney made those fervent claims, no administration would have the slightest problem linking al-Qaeda to Iraq (or Syria, Yemen, or a number of other countries). A decade later, the evidence is in. Sunni Iraq, along with areas of neighboring Syria, one of the countries that was supposed to bow down before American might, now houses a rudimentary jihadist state, a creature birthed into the world in significant part thanks to the dreams and fantasies of the visionaries of the Bush administration. Across the Greater Middle East, jihadism and al-Qaeda wannabes of every sort are on the rise, while terror groups are destabilizing regions from Pakistan to northern Africa.

Creating an Arc of Instability

In the period before and after the invasion of Iraq, top Bush officials and their neocon supporters spoke with relish about taming an area stretching from northern Africa through the Middle East and deep into Central Asia that they termed an “arc of instability”. In a February 2006 address to the American Legion focused on his Global War on Terror, for instance, President Bush typically said, “Slowly but surely, we're helping to transform the broader Middle East from an arc of instability into an arc of freedom. And as freedom reaches more people in this vital region, we'll have new allies in the war on terror, and new partners in the cause of moderation in the Muslim world and in the cause of peace.”

By then that “arc”, which in the period before 9/11 had been reasonably stable, was already aflame. Today, it is ablaze. Almost 13 years after the launching of the Global War on Terror and the first bombing runs in Afghanistan, 11 years after a global antiwar protest went unheard and the invasion of Iraq was launched, and three years after Americans gathered in front of the White House to cheer the death of Osama bin Laden, that arc has been destabilized in a stunning way.

As things recently went from bad to worse in Iraq, jihadist militants in Pakistan attacked Karachi International Airport, an assault that stunned the country and suggested that the reach of the Pakistani Taliban was growing. At the same time, after a six-month pause, the Obama administration resumed its CIA drone assassination campaign in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, a deeply unpopular program that has been a significant destabilizing factor in its own right. Meanwhile, in Yemen, where the U.S. has for years been conducting a special operations and drone war against a growing al-Qaeda wannabe outfit, unknown militants knocked out the electricity in Sanaa, the capital, for days. The Syrian bloodbath, of course, continues with estimates of 160,000 or more deaths in that multi-sided conflict, while in Libya, now an essentially ungovernable and chaotic land of jihadist and other militias and ambitious generals, tensions and fighting increased.

Think of this as George W. Bush’s nightmare and Osama bin Laden’s wet dream. On September 11th, 2001, a relatively small, modestly funded organization with a knack for planning terror surprises every couple of years had a remarkable stroke of televised luck. From those falling towers, everything followed, thanks in large part to the acts of the fundamentalists of the Bush administration, whose top officials thought they had spotted their main chance, geopolitically speaking, in the carnage of the moment.

Almost 13 years later, there is a jihadist proto-state, a fantasy caliphate, in the heart of the Middle East. Now a dime a dozen in the region, jihadists of an al-Qaedan bent are armed to the teeth with cast-off American weaponry. In northern Africa, other jihadists are using weaponry from the former arsenals of Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi, looted in the aftermath of President Obama’s can’t-miss 2011 intervention in that country. The jihadists of ISIS now have hundreds of millions of dollars stolen from the Mosul branch of the Iraqi central bank for funding and have advanced toward Baghdad. Even Osama bin Laden might not have assumed things would go quite so swimmingly.

The Guns of Folly

In the wake of Mosul's fall, ISIS advanced even more rapidly than the American army heading for Baghdad in the spring of 2003. In some Sunni-dominated cities and towns, the takeovers were remarkably bloodless. In Baiji, with a power plant that supplies electricity to Baghdad and Iraq’s largest oil refinery (now under attack), the insurgents reportedly called the police and asked them to leave town — and they complied. In Kirkuk, a city in northern Iraq that the Kurds have long claimed as the natural capital for an independent Kurdistan, Iraqi troops quietly abandoned their weaponry and uniforms and left town, while armed Kurdish forces moved in, undoubtedly permanently.

All in all, it’s been a debacle the likes of which we’ve seen only twice in our history. In China, when in 1949 Chiang Kai-shek’s largely American armed and trained military disintegrated before the insurgent forces of Communist leader Mao Zedong and a quarter-century later, when a purely American military creation, the South Vietnamese army, collapsed in the face of an offensive by North Vietnamese troops and local rebel forces. In each case, the resulting defeat was psychologically unnerving in the United States and led to bitter, exceedingly strange, and long-lasting debates about who “lost” China and who “lost” Vietnam.

Early signs of an equally bizarre debate over the “loss” of Iraq are already appearing here. This should surprise no one, as the only thing left to pass around is blame. Senator John McCain, a fervent supporter of the 2003 invasion and occupation, launched the most recent round of the blame game. He pinned fault for the onrushing events on the Obama administration’s decision to pull U.S. forces out of Iraq in 2011 (thanks to an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration) without leaving a significant presence behind. Citing himself as if he were someone else, he said, “Lindsey Graham and John McCain were right. Our failure to leave forces in Iraq is why Senator Graham and I predicted this would happen.”

Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri was typical of the Republican politicians who began promoting this line. “It’s a desperate situation,” he said. “It’s moving quickly. It appears to me that the chickens are coming home to roost for our policy of not leaving anybody there to be a stabilizing force.” In a similar blast, the Wall Street Journal editorial page wrote, “In withdrawing from Iraq in toto, Mr. Obama put his desire to have a talking point for his re-election campaign above America's strategic interests. Now we and the world are facing this reality: A civil war in Iraq and the birth of a terrorist haven that has the confidence, and is fast acquiring the means, to raise a banner for a new generation of jihadists, both in Iraq and beyond.”

And so it goes. In this case, however, none of it may matter much. In a country visibly sick of our wars of this century in which even many elite figures find further intervention in Iraq distasteful, “Who lost Iraq?” may never gain the sort of traction the other two “lost” debates did.

In the meantime, however, the world of the Middle East is being turned upside down. Take the example of Iran. Once upon a time, Iraq was thought to be just a way station. As neocons of that moment liked to quip, “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” As it happened, the neighborhood around Baghdad quickly grew so ugly and the Bush administration soon found itself so bogged down in unwinnable minority insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan that it never put the U.S. military on that road to Tehran.

Today, the Iranians, it seems, are riding to Washington’s rescue in Iraq. It's already rumored that they may be sending, or considering sending, elements of the Republican Guard in to protect Baghdad. As a result, the U.S. finds itself in a tacit alliance with Iran in Iraq, while still in opposition to it in Syria. At the same time, it's still allied with Saudi Arabia in Syria against the regime of Bashar al-Assad, while facing the disastrous fruits of Saudi funding of the brutal newborn jihadi state at least temporarily coming into existence in the Sunni borderlands of Iraq and Syria.

The Middle Eastern system as once known has, with the singular exception of Israel, largely evaporated and where it was, there is now increasingly chaos. In all likelihood, it will only get worse. “We” may not have “lost” Iraq, but can there be any question that Washington lost in Iraq? American goals in the region went down in flames in a fashion so spectacular, so ignominious, that today nothing is left of them. To the question, “Who won Iraq?” there may be no answer at all, or perhaps just the grim response: no one. In the end, Iraqis will surely be the losers, big time, as Syrians are just across the now nonexistent border between what until recently were two countries.

As for the future Washington has on offer, the Obama administration is, it seems, considering responding to the crisis in Iraq in the only way it knows how: with bombs, cruise missiles, and drones. The geopolitical dreams of the Bush era are buried somewhere deep in the rubble of Iraq, while the present White House has neither visionaries nor global dreams, grandiose or otherwise. There are only managers and bureaucrats desperately trying to handle an unco-operative planet. The question that remains is: Will they or won’t they send American air power back into Iraq? Will they or won’t they, that is, loose the guns of folly and so quite predictably destabilize a terrible situation further?

In the meantime, a small footnote to future history: given what we’ve just seen, it might be worth taking with a grain of salt the news out of Afghanistan about the increasingly impressive abilities of the Afghan security forces, another gigantic crew set up, funded, trained, and armed by the U.S. military (and associated private contractors). After all, haven’t we heard that somewhere before?

______________________________________

• Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of “The United States of Fear” as well as a history of the Cold War, “The End of Victory Culture” (now also in a Kindle edition), runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is “Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050”.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175858/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_guns_of_folly

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from the Weekend Herald....

America doesn't quite get the evil genius concept

By PAUL THOMAS | 5:00AM - Saturday, June 21, 2014



WITH evil geniuses what you see is just the first instalment of what you're going to get.

That's because evil geniuses aren't one-dimensional. On the contrary, they play the long game. They're devious if not fiendishly clever in pursuit of their wicked goals, usually world domination. That's what makes them evil geniuses.

Take Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), the villain in the most recent James Bond movie, Skyfall. Early on he blows up MI6 headquarters. Your average terrorist would dine out on that for years, but for Silva it's just the first step.

The point of the exercise wasn't to reduce MI6 to rubble, with significant loss of life and disruption to Britain's intelligence and security network; it was to force MI6 to relocate to emergency underground headquarters, thus setting the scene for phase two of his master plan.

Or take Osama bin Laden. 9/11 wasn't an end in itself. The wider aim was to provoke America into an over-reaction that validated the al-Qaeda world view of the west wanting to dominate if not destroy Islam, and transformed the conflict into an overt global confrontation and drove young Muslims to the jihadist cause.

He succeeded, probably beyond his wildest dreams. America invaded and occupied two Muslim countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, but has failed to stabilise either, let alone transform them into functioning democracies. Militant Islamist organisations are popping up like mushrooms, here, there and everywhere.

And almost 13 years after the event, 9/11 continues to divide the West with no consensus on the extent of the Islamist threat or the best way of responding to it.

This strategy is as old as terrorism itself. Rebel guerrillas attack an army convoy killing soldiers, then melt back into the jungle; unable to engage the perpetrators, the army attacks a village suspected of providing the insurgents with moral and material support; sympathy for the rebel cause grows in the countryside.

Doubtless there were those in the American intelligence community who suspected what bin Laden was up to, but their warnings were ignored by the Bush Administration which saw the chance to obliterate several birds with one stone: depose Saddam Hussein, cement America's position as the sole superpower with an awe-inspiring display of military reach and firepower, and create a new paradigm in the Middle East by transforming Iraq into a go-ahead democracy.

Iraq's slide into sectarian war is further confirmation that bin Laden got it right and the Bush Administration got it horribly wrong.

We now have the architects of the Iraq war demanding that America makes the same mistake all over again in order to contain the damage done by the original mistake.

Here's Republican Senator John Cornyn via Twitter: "Sad but true. It took nearly 4,500 American lives to win freedom for Iraq. It took one President to lose it."

The freedom Cornyn invokes is a particularly narrow and specific one: freedom from Saddam Hussein. It is not freedom from fear, want, corruption, displacement, destabilisation, social breakdown.

George W. Bush, Tony Blair and their neo-conservative acolytes cast the situation in Iraq as a choice between tyranny and freedom. Since the Iraqi people weren't in a position to make a choice, Bush and Blair made it for them. Except in Iraq and much of the Middle East, the opposite of tyranny isn't freedom, it's chaos. The Bush/Blair Middle East doctrine was based on the proposition that the way to defeat terrorism is by overthrowing tyranny. As events in Iraq, Syria and Libya have shown, this is a delusion. If defeating al-Qaeda and its affiliates is the number one priority, then the sensible thing to do, in realpolitik terms, is to ally yourself with regimes which are good at killing Islamists — like Saddam's and Bashar Al-Assad's — rather than bring them down.

Perhaps the only way to end Iraq's nightmare is to split the country into Sunni and Shia entities. In fact, partition might be the solution for other hopelessly divided nations which are at risk of becoming ungovernable because the two sides loathe each other and can't agree on anything.

For instance America. You could create a liberal, civilised country in the shape of an inverted horseshoe, beginning in New Orleans, going up the east coast to Boston, across the US-Canadian border via Chicago to Seattle and down the west coast to San Diego.

The rest could be what it yearns to be: a Bible-bashing, gay-shunning, cross-burning, snake-handling, gun-crazy redneck paradise. You'd just have to make sure the right part got the nukes.

• Paul Thomas is a Weekend Herald columnist.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=11278398

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

from the Los Angeles Times....

If only Iraq's new invaders had a Dick Cheney to give them advice

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PDT - Thursday, June 26, 2014



PRESIDENT Barack Obama is sending 300 American advisors to Iraq to see if they can help stop an army of Islamic fanatics from undoing everything the United States military accomplished in nearly nine years of warfare. We’ll see how that goes, but it might be even more effective to send just one guy to give advice to the Sunni militants: Dick Cheney.

I’m not suggesting the former vice president would actually wish to advise the vicious horde who call themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) — he’s too red, white and true blue for that — but if he could steer them in the same self-destructive direction that he steered the USA, he’d finally be doing his country a favor.

As we well know, Cheney was one of the key architects of the Iraq war, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his assistant Paul Wolfowitz. Those three — backed by a supporting cast of chicken hawks in the media, in the Bush administration and in various right-of-center think tanks — fulfilled a neo-conservative dream by concocting excuses to invade Iraq, depose Saddam Hussein and thereby kick off a rush toward democracy throughout the Middle East.

The result was a brief blush of tyrant toppling and elections followed by anarchy, chaos, instability, terrorism and sectarian bloodletting, from Libya to Syria. It seems the U.S. spent $2 trillion and wore out an army trying to defy reality by peddling the American Way to people who would rather settle ancient scores and kill each other.

Having predicted a very different result, Cheney now shows no sign of remorse or humility. In recent days he has led the critics of the Obama administration who insist the current mess in Mesopotamia is the president’s fault. In a Wall Street Journal column, Cheney said of Obama, “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.”

Cheney’s hubris has infuriated a lot of people. Even Fox News interviewer Megyn Kelly was emboldened to confront Cheney about it. After quoting the ex-vice president’s slam against Obama, Kelly said to Cheney, “But time and time again, history has proven that you got it wrong, as well, on Iraq, sir. You said there was no doubt Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. You said we would be greeted as liberators. You said the Iraq insurgency was in its last throes back in 2005. And you said that, after our intervention, extremists would have to rethink their strategy of jihad.... What do you say to those who say you were so wrong about so much at the expense of so many?”

In response, Cheney rattled off the same arguments he made to push the war back in 2003 and indicated he believes victory was in America’s grasp when he and George W. Bush left office in 2009.

As Kelly said, history has proven Cheney got it wrong, over and over again, but he sure doesn't seem to know it. He’s the kind of self-blinded prophet we should wish on the latest invaders in Iraq.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-dick-cheney-advice-20140625-story.html

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

Regarding Dick Cheney's column published in the Wall Street Journal mentioned in the above opinion piece by David Horsey, click on the link and read that opinion piece by Dubya's former Vice-President, then scroll down to the reader comments and check those out.

There are currently (as I post this) 4677 posted comments, and you only need to read the first 2-3 pages of them to get the pattern of what Wall Street Journal readers think of Dick Cheney's self-serving lunacy & bullshit....the man is clearly a “danger to humanity” who needs to be certified and locked away in a lunatic asylum.

[Im2Sexy4MyPants]

Invading Iraq 2.0: ISIS Propaganda, Proxy Wars and US-NATO’s ‘Blitzkrieg’

The Western-backed Al-Qaeda offshoot ISIS, has made its way to Iraq through Turkey and over the northeastern border of Syria. This new terror campaign appears to have been rolled out with a decades old objective, which is wrought with violence, propaganda and destabilization funding from the usual sponsors…

We’ve learned that much of Iraq has ‘fallen’ into the hands of Sunni militants, as the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has pushed their way through to Iraq five months ago, while both Britain’s MI6, as well as the CIA, had prior knowledge of the well-funded terror group’s movements - allowing their apparent death march to continue after being warned well in advance. According to a Telegraph news release entitled,”Britain and US neglected alert to Iraq jihadist takeover ” Kurdish intelligence had specifically disclosed that ISIS displayed a growing terror-grip in the region and that there was a “planned takeover of northern Iraq“:

“The head of intelligence for the autonomous Kurdish regional government, which has links with the West, said he had repeatedly tried to send warnings both to the central government in Baghdad and to its allies, Britain and America.

But despite repeated attempts to impress on Washington and London the seriousness of the unfolding situation, he said there was no response from either government.”

This information also comes on the heels as nearly 500 British-born fighters apparently made their way to fight alongside ISIS – in addition to 15 Somali-Americans, according to intelligence reports. It has been said that one of the men who is has subsequently joined up with ISIS, Rayeed Kahn, lived just a few doors down from four men who plead guilty to an “Al-Qaeda inspired plot” to destroy London’s Stock Exchange a couple years back .

In a cleanly shot video production apparently by ISIS radicals, Kahn is seen dazed and possibly drugged, in a video that is being branded as a recruitment tool for the terror outfit. Kahn was recently accepted to study at Midinah University in Saudi Arabia in 2013/14, just prior to his life taking an apparent extremist turn.

In 2012, along with five others, Abdul Malik Miah, Gurukanth Desai, Shah Mohammed Lutfar Rahman and Mohammed Moksudur Rahman Chowdhury, all plead guilty in a plot to detonate bombs within London’s Stock Exchange, other alleged targets included Big Ben and the Church of Scientology. The group was said to be tied to a training facility in Pakistan and had apparently obtained instructions from Al-Qaeda’s ‘Inspire’ publication and CIA linked Anwar  Al-Awlaki, who if you remember, had been invited to lunch at the Pentagon in the aftermath of 9/11,  meeting with top military personnel. Al-Awlaki, was a US born citizen and became a target after being named an ‘operations leader’ for Al-Qaeda, he was subsequently killed in a drone strike in Yemen. Recently a redacted version of the memo used to conduct a military strike on Al-Awlaki was revealed by a New York court. (Photo static.guim.co.uk )

Western Complicity & Occupation by Proxy

In March of 2013, it was reported that the US, UK and France were training Syrian opposition members in Jordan , focusing on heavy artillery and urban warfare skills. The training base is said to be near the borders of Iraq and Syria, in a northern town called Safawi. While plenty of media outlets have reported that there were FSA facilities in Jordan in the past, there’s been a growing suspicion about the CIA’s involvement in the province, as evidence has come to light that there was an ISIS connection with the rebels being trained there, as reported by SyrianTruth.org  , which was then covered here at 21Wire , that displayed a relationship between a Turkish paramilitary group called “Front Victory” and ISIS after its seizure of chlorine gas. Front Victory is said to have a history of “violent insurgency,” and experience using chlorine as a chemical weapon, many of the groups founders have come out of ISIS – who were first installed in Syria in 2011:

“Jordanian intelligence proceeded to facilitate the smuggling of chlorine gas from Jordan to the organization known as “Islamic State of Iraq”, the first to use chlorine gas technology (with the help of Jordanian Intelligence and Saudi Arabia) as a “chemical weapon” – a taboo issue in the media in the context of covering genocide….

Given the fact that the “first generation” and “second generation” of the founders and staff of “Front Victory” hailed originally out of the “Islamic State of Iraq” organisation, they were the only ones among the insurgent Syrians who are schooled in this technique. In addition, the organization “Islamic State of Iraq” deliberately to be the first installments of his gunmen who were sent to Syria as of fall 2011…

Weeks ago, “Front Victory” are reported to have begun manufacturing chlorine gas shells to be used in mortars and homemade rockets around Aleppo, utilizing the stock from the chlorine gas plant. Note that the said missile was launched from an area “Kafr Daal” in northwest of Aleppo.”

We’re being told that the black-clad ISIS jihadists have been burning and beheading their way through Iraq and after taking control of an oil stronghold within the Mosul region, a clearer picture has emerged as to those who stand to benefit the most by supporting such awful carnage in the second-largest oil state in world. Well-known geopolitical analyst and strategic risk consultant, William Engdahl states in his latest release, “ISIS in Iraq stinks of CIA/NATO ‘dirty war’ op ,” that their is a decidedly Western bend to the propaganda and violence seen coming out about ISIS:

“The very details of the ISIS military success in the key Iraqi oil center, Mosul, are suspect. According to well-informed Iraqi journalists, ISIS overran the strategic Mosul region, site of some of the world’s most prolific oilfields, with barely a shot fired in resistance. According to one report , residents of Tikrit reported remarkable displays of “soldiers handing over their weapons and uniforms peacefully to militants who ordinarily would have been expected to kill government soldiers on the spot.”

We are told that ISIS masked psychopaths captured “arms and ammunition from the fleeing security forces” - arms and ammunition supplied by the American government. The offensive coincides with a successful campaign by ISIS in eastern Syria. According to Iraqi journalists, Sunni tribal chiefs in the region had been convinced to side with ISIS against the Shiite Al-Maliki government in Baghdad. They were promised a better deal under ISIS Sunni Sharia than with Baghdad anti-Sunni rule.”

When looking for the motive in any ‘global crime’ we must always consider what natural resources are being fought over and those that are being pillaged, as they are often followed by some sort of destabilization campaign prompting media to declare a one-sided call to action as a remedy for an already destructive process. We should also  examine the motivations of foreign aid or weaponry given to destabilized regions  of the world as it often coincides with a future ‘regime change’ about to take place. It should be noted that last year Syrian oil field’s had also been seized by an Al-Qaeda affiliate  - which would directly benefit the wider geopolitical and transnational corporate interests of the West.

Also, what kind of compliance is expected from groups receiving aid from Western interests and how will they seek to inflame and polarize audiences by utilizing the existing rift between Shia-Sunni denominations?

Additionally, the West attempts to gain a foothold on the Middle East by strengthening Sunni terror brigades, clamping down on the Shia sect. Western interests also want the Shia-dominated Maliki government out of power in Baghdad.

In November 2013, according to the FBI dozens of  terrorists were allowed to come to the US  under refugee status and in 2009, they discovered two Al-Qaeda terrorists living in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Why were known terrorists allowed to come to the US? There appears to be an substantial effort to bring terror to Western countries. Why? Is it so that they can justify their expensive war theater?

IMAGE: ‘The Burning of Babylon’ – ISIS has made a violent push through Turkey and the northeastern edge of Syria. Following NATO’s hostile intervention in Libya in 2011, we learned that AQIM had joined forces with the Al Qaeda-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) – all of which are inexorably tied to the CIA and British intelligence agencies since Al Qaeda’s inception after the Soviet war in Afghanistan during the late 80′s (Photo irishmirror.ie )

The current terror creation ISIS, seems to have benefited from US, UK and  France with its FSA counterparts having received western military arms and training in Jordan. ISIS appears to have swallowed up large swaths of Iraq in violence, using it as brutal breeding ground to be pitted simultaneously against Syria and other Western targets such as Iran.

In the article entitled, “Al Qaeda and the War on Terrorism” from Professor Michel Chossudovsky, the Western intelligence infrastructure is fully exposed and in particular the role of the US:

“The US intelligence apparatus has created it own terrorist organizations. And at the same time, it creates its own terrorist warnings concerning the terrorist organizations which it has itself created. Meanwhile, a cohesive multibillion dollar counterterrorism program “to go after” these terrorist organizations has been put in place.”

When you put Professor Chossudovsky’s thoughts into context with what routinely occurs when there is a sudden ‘lighting war’ in the Middle East, we see how Western operations benefit from their own nightmare fantasies of consolidation and control by increasing funding for the next branch of Al-Qaeda, while simultaneously appearing to condemn the group for its actions, calling for more profit-based war efforts through different alphabet programs and defense contracting work. This was evident in the “Friend’s of Syria“ conference in Paris, supported by Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State, among others, where a violent Western backed campaign was outlined for Syria in July of 2012.


Watch how Western media continues to spin the information coming out of Iraq, Syria and Iran. Western backed proxy wars steer the type of propaganda we see in most major media outlets today…

www.globalresearch.ca/invading-iraq-2-0-isis-propaganda-proxy-wars-and-us-natos-blitzkrieg/5388616" data-title="Invading Iraq 2.0: ISIS Propaganda, Proxy Wars and US-NATO’s ‘Blitzkrieg’">

http://www.globalresearch.ca/invading-iraq-2-0-isis-propaganda-proxy-wars-and-us-natos-blitzkrieg/5388616

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

So.....the latest casualty is the Iraqi prime minister.