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ISIS seizes key Iraqi city of Ramadi as government forces pull back

Unless their is an invervention from outside powers I predict that the Anbar province will be in ISIS hands by the end of the year. They have a foothold in the region and they enjoy a lot of support from the local population.
 
SouthernDemocrat said:
As ISIS is nothing but the new name for Al Qaeda in Iraq, a terrorist organization that started in Iraq after our invasion, it would not even exist today had we never went in.

Islamic State (ISIS) - Council on Foreign Relations

Moreover, the fact that the military of Iraq cannot defeat it, despite their outnumbering ISIS forces by over 10 to 1, is evidence of the shear incompetence of the country's government. Of course, I suppose had we continued to stay there, despite the fact the people of Iraq and its government wanted us out, at a cost of about 100 billion of month indefinitely, we could have possibly held the country together.
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It's a phony argument. The group dates back to 1999. The reason that AQ in Iraq is now called ISIS is because AQ in Iraq had its ass handed to it by the US troops in Iraq.

The fact is that this group, no matter what you call it, was in shambles when it retreated to Syria. It later would joined the resistance movement supported by the Obama administration. It gained power there and then came back to Iraq once Obama idiotically pulled all US troops out of Iraq.

You want to know how responsible Bush is for ISIS? Look at the condition of ISIS (AQ in Iraq) in January 2009. The ISIS we see today was constituted on Obama's watch, filling all the power gaps that Obama created in the region.
 
jmotivator said:
It's a phony argument. The group dates back to 1999. The reason that AQ in Iraq is now called ISIS is because AQ in Iraq had its ass handed to it by the US troops in Iraq.

The fact is that this group, no matter what you call it, was in shambles when it retreated to Syria. It later would joined the resistance movement supported by the Obama administration. It gained power there and then came back to Iraq once Obama idiotically pulled all US troops out of Iraq.

You want to know how responsible Bush is for ISIS? Look at the condition of ISIS (AQ in Iraq) in January 2009. The ISIS we see today was constituted on Obama's watch, filling all the power gaps that Obama created in the region.
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We did not stay in Iraq because the Iraqi government no longer wanted us there. The only way they would allow us to stay would be if we would have subjected our soldiers to their courts, which is entirely unacceptable. The idiotic thing to do was to have gone in there in the first place. Had we continued the policy of containment with Iraq, we would not be dealing with this today.
 
jmotivator said:
As bad as ISIS currently is, they have yet to reach the brutality of Saddam Hussein.

Wishing that Saddam was still in power to keep ISIS at bay is like wishing that you hadn't killed the man eating lion that was scaring off the man eating hyenas.
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Close, I'm only evaluating the history for what we know. To be honest we have to include all of the history of the region.

And as horrible as this is going to sound that region of the world has more aptitude for brutal dictators to keep ideological factions from taking pocket control *than* operating a government with western style ideologies expecting those ideological factions to go along with notions like freedom, tolerance, and self determination.

My issue is simply too many in the region subscribe to a splinter of the same religion that suggests based on text in their most holy of book to be socially controlled by "religious authority" to the highest degree. And that is why dictators control the region overall. History confirmed.
 
RDS said:
In retrospect Saddam Hussein would have managed Iraq a million times better.
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Unfortunately, that's true. We wouldn't see Iraq as the hotbed of terrorist activity that it currently is and its people wouldn't be subjected to both Western and Terrorist attack.
 
LeoVlaming said:
Saddam Hussein was an unstable megalomaniac and a constant threat to the whole region.
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....and still would have done a better job. That's how badly we cocked this thing up since the start. This is why when you go to war you need......a plan.
 
OrphanSlug said:
Then my follow up question has to be what would be your policy suggestion for all of Iraq? Because at this point, regardless of Kurdish Independence, all that is left is to either watch the implosion eventually complete where the current Iraqi government completely fails, or agree to the "South Korea" model of permanent military occupation.
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I think a residual force like the one left in South Korea in 1953, but on a somewhat smaller scale, would have prevented most of the chaos unfolding in Iraq now. The U.S. military has to be stationed somewhere, after all, and part of our forces should be positioned abroad in areas where their presence is a stabilizing force. The yammering about how Mr. Obama's hands were tied by a status-of-forces agreement is an unconvincing attempt by his acolytes to excuse his weakness. Any president who had been determined to maintain a residual U.S. force in Iraq would not have let a piece of paper stand in his way. President Limpwrist didn't want any such force, so instead of insisting on changing the existing agreement, he used it as an excuse to withdraw completely. We are seeing the results.
 
SouthernDemocrat said:
We did not stay in Iraq because the Iraqi government no longer wanted us there. The only way they would allow us to stay would be if we would have subjected our soldiers to their courts, which is entirely unacceptable. The idiotic thing to do was to have gone in there in the first place. Had we continued the policy of containment with Iraq, we would not be dealing with this today.
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This is a false narrative from the Obama White House that was exposed long ago by Gates himself as well as the NYT and other sources.

"The White House insisted that the collapse of the talks was not a setback. “As we reviewed the 10,000 option, we came to the conclusion that achieving the goal of a security partnership was not dependent on the size of our footprint in-country, and that stability in Iraq did not depend on the presence of U.S. forces,” a senior Obama administration official said."

Yeah, wrong.

Maliki and Gates wanted 16,000 troops in Iraq, Obama kept adjusting the troop numbers downward until the number was too small to do any good.

Obama promissed he would pull troops out of Iraq and he made sure to scuttle the negotiations to achieve that goal.
 
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OrphanSlug said:
While true it is far less likely that ISIS, or someone like them, would organize under a ruler like Saddam. Again as we have discussed many times before, consider the aptitude of the people we are talking about here in adopting western governmental and social ideologies in concert with the various splinters of the same religion they all follow. I would argue well that the region is far more unstable today than it was then simply because of the small messes we have left all over the region from what we do best. Exchange one set of problematic governments for a new set of problematic governments. And do not discount that ISIS is a product of opportunity, not strength. If the Syrian government had been stronger and Saddam was still around, we would not be having this discussion. We would be talking about the impacts of brutal dictators in the region.
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They organized under us.
 
Roadvirus said:
Another Obama FAIL!

If we had 100K troops on the ground right now, ISIS would be obliterated from Iraq in a year....maybe less.
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If we had a 100k of troops in Iraq right now, we would be spending 100 billion a month on that ****hole.
 
jmotivator said:
This is a false narrative from the Obama White House that was exposed long ago by Gates himself as well as the NYT and other sources.

"The White House insisted that the collapse of the talks was not a setback. “As we reviewed the 10,000 option, we came to the conclusion that achieving the goal of a security partnership was not dependent on the size of our footprint in-country, and that stability in Iraq did not depend on the presence of U.S. forces,” a senior Obama administration official said."

Yeah, wrong.

Maliki and Gates wanted 16,000 troops in Iraq, Obama kept adjusting the troop numbers downward until the number was too small to do any good.

Obama promissed he would pull troops out of Iraq and he made sure to scuttle the negotiations to achieve that goal.
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That is flat out revisionism.

What killed the deal

The agreement failed over a demand that American troops be given immunity from prosecution by Iraqis, a very touchy political issue within the Iraqi Parliament. Some experts said Iraqi leaders may not have been willing to take great political risk with their citizens in exchange for a relatively small American force.

But no immunity meant no sizable residual troop presence.

"When the Americans asked for immunity, the Iraqi side answered that it was not possible," al-Maliki said in an October 2011 news conference. "The discussions over the number of trainers and the place of training stopped. Now that the issue of immunity was decided and that no immunity to be given, the withdrawal has started."
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http://www.politifact.com/punditfac...wanted-keep-10000-troops-iraq-abcs-raddatz-c/

All the reporting at the time was that the Iraqi government no longer wanted us there:

Iraq’s Government, Not Obama, Called Time on the U.S. Troop Presence | TIME.com
 
SouthernDemocrat said:
That is flat out revisionism.



Obama wanted to keep 10,000 troops in Iraq, ABC's Raddatz claims | PunditFact

All the reporting at the time was that the Iraqi government no longer wanted us there:

Iraq’s Government, Not Obama, Called Time on the U.S. Troop Presence | TIME.com
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It's not revisionist. Your Time article makes the ludicrous claim that the troop pull out was Bush's fault when the status of forces agreement was always for Obama to negotiate.

The NYT article actually goes into detail of the step by step process in the negotiation and why it failed, your Time article shows absolutely no signs of actually interviewing anyone involved in the investigation, just left wing opinion swill. Maliki wanted troops, a lot of them.

The Politifact article has Martha Raddatz claiming that the White House wanted 10,000 troops, but then goes on to confirm that the Iraqis and US Military advisors wanted 16,000 troops and then goes on to confirm the NYT story that Obama only offered 1500 troops.

That they then go on to say that Raddatz misleading and wrong statement is "mostly true" is simply another piece of evidence that Politifact is a dishonest joke. "She's wrong, Obama actually only offered 1500 troops... but he had earlier lied about wanting 10,000 troops that he never offered so we rate this lie mostly true."
 
SouthernDemocrat said:
Yet another example of how terrible of an idea it was to go into Iraq in the first place back in 2003.
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actually this is what happens when you tell your enemies when you are pulling out.
 
SouthernDemocrat said:
Yet another example of how terrible of an idea it was to go into Iraq in the first place back in 2003.
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hindsight is 20/20.

bush senior during the gulf war backed out of iraq when he had the chance to obliterate its govt,looking back now though its easy to see he predicted the outcome.


whether or not we should have invaded,we did,and those problems we created will not go away by wishing we never started a war,nor will they go away by simply bombing the enemy.a strategic plan needs to be in place for long term stability,or we will end up with never ending conflict in iraq.
 
Higgins86 said:
Unless their is an invervention from outside powers I predict that the Anbar province will be in ISIS hands by the end of the year. They have a foothold in the region and they enjoy a lot of support from the local population.
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Oh, well then there's no reason for us to be involved. The U.S. is a strong supporter of self-determination.
 
Ikari said:
....and still would have done a better job. That's how badly we cocked this thing up since the start. This is why when you go to war you need......a plan.
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Better still, this is why you don't make **** up about other countries so you can go break them, leaving behind a power vacuum that assuredly will be exploited.
 
beerftw said:
hindsight is 20/20.

bush senior during the gulf war backed out of iraq when he had the chance to obliterate its govt,looking back now though its easy to see he predicted the outcome.


whether or not we should have invaded,we did,and those problems we created will not go away by wishing we never started a war,nor will they go away by simply bombing the enemy.a strategic plan needs to be in place for long term stability,or we will end up with never ending conflict in iraq.
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Those of us that were opposing this in real time, at the time, had 20/20 foresight vision. It took a long time for the rest to catch up, but finally a plurality of Americans acknowledge the tragedy of Bush's invasion and occupation of Iraq. And by no means are we finished paying for his colossal **** up.
 
reinoe said:
Oh, well then there's no reason for us to be involved. The U.S. is a strong supporter of self-determination.
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Well..............unless it's eastern Ukrainians, Crimean's or the folks in Bahrain.
 
ludin said:
actually this is what happens when you tell your enemies when you are pulling out.
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Oh yes! It was all great in Iraq when we were there! It was stable! Not corrupt! Not under constant attacks from terrorist groups! It was great! :roll:
 
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