ISIS: Remaining and Expanding

[Magda Hassan]

Airstrikes Are Like 'Casual Sex,' Says Former NSA Head Michael Hayden

Elizabeth Nolan Brown|Sep. 12, 2014 1:45 pm


@amylittlefield/Twitter
Michael Hayden, former director of both the National Security Agency and the CIA, has been offering his wisdom on warfare in Iraq, and it's ... interesting. Hayden told U.S. News & World Report that President Obama's plan to try and bomb ISIS out of Syria instead of sending in ground troops has "all of the attraction of casual sex."
A ringing endorsement, right? Wrong! Hayden is no fan of the casual sex, and no fan of Obama's plan, which he said "seems to offer gratification but with very little commitment."
"I guess he's right," quipped Jessica Roy at New York. "Unlike ground troops, drones don't spend the night."
Of course it's all fun and games until you stop and think about the fact that this man is describing killing people as erotic and gratifying and the failure to send American troops to die immediately as an irresponsibility.
Hayden continued: "We need to be wary of a strategy that puts emphasis on air power and air power alone." If you bomb it, then you gotta put a ring on it, obviously.

More on Hayden's foreign policy agenda:

http://reason.com/blog/2014/09/12/airstr...sex-hayden

[David Guyatt]

Ever growing political will to go to war here in the UK. This could soon include ground troops (I suspect it will) - if local middle east nations won't stump of soldiers of their own.

Why is it that we in the west just stagger from one war to another?

Oh yummy, yum-yum. More war, more military sales, more profits, lots more back-handers, lots less domestic introversion, continuing control over foreign minerals.... everyone's a winner.

Except those poor sods who have their limbs bombed off or are made dead.

But fuck them, they don't count do they --- they're just battle cattle.

[Magda Hassan]

Surely just a coincidence.....::headexplode::::puppet::

The mysterious link between the US military prison Camp Bucca and ISIS leaders

The mysterious link between the US military prison Camp Bucca and ISIS leaders

A flag of the Islamic State (IS) is seen on the other side of a bridge at the frontline of fighting between Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Islamist militants in Rashad, on the road between Kirkuk and Tikrit, on September 11, 2014. (Photo: AFP-JM Lopez)

By: Mohammed Mahmoud Mortada
Published Saturday, September 13, 2014

Beyond conspiracy theories which are often justified in an era where everything appears as though it is part of a plan or a scheme we have the right to ask why the majority of the leaders of the Islamic State (IS), formerly the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), had all been incarcerated in the same prison at Camp Bucca, which was run by the US occupation forces near Omm Qasr in southeastern Iraq.
In the context of conspiracy theories, there are a lot of rumors about links between IS and the US intelligence or affiliated organizations. But to what extent are these theories credible? Is there evidence that corroborate them?
These questions seem legitimate, provided that ready-made answers are not accepted without convincing evidence. However, it is difficult to get this kind of evidence, and we might need another Edward Snowden or WikiLeaks to learn the real truth about the relationship between IS and US intelligence.
Yet not having this evidence should not prevent us from trying to gather some clues that may not amount to definitive evidence, but which will no doubt question the narrative that fully exonerates US intelligence from involvement with the jihadis.
First of all, most IS leaders had passed through the former U.S. detention facility at Camp Bucca in Iraq. So who were the most prominent of these detainees?
Abu Ayman al-Iraqi… also "graduated" from Camp Bucca, and currently serves as a member on IS' military council. The leader of IS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, tops the list. He was detained from 2004 until mid-2006. After he was released, he formed the Army of Sunnis, which later merged with the so-called Mujahideen Shura Council. What happened during Baghdadi's detention in Bucca remains a mystery. Some press reports said he had been detained as a "civilian" in prison for 10 months in 2004, while other reports stated he was captured by the US forces in 2005 and held for four years at Camp Bucca. This latter possibility is unlikely, given that Baghdadi had formed the Army of Sunnis and joined the Mujahideen Shura Council shortly before the assassination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June 2006. This is while bearing in mind that this council was established in January 2006, which makes it more likely that Baghdadi had been released either in late 2005 or early 2006.
It should be noted that after the Army of the Sunnis merged with the Mujahideen Shura Council, the Americans were able to successfully hunt down the leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq, starting with Zarqawi in 2006, and not ending with Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Hamza al-Muhajir in 2010, the death of the former being the event that paved the way for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to become the organization's leader.
Another prominent IS leader today is Abu Ayman al-Iraqi, who was a former officer in the Iraqi army under Saddam Hussein. This man also "graduated" from Camp Bucca, and currently serves as a member on IS' military council.
Another member of the military council who was in Bucca is Adnan Ismail Najm. He was known as Osama al-Bilawi (Abu Abdul_Rahman al-Bilawi). IS named the operation for the "invasion of Mosul" after him. He was detained on January 2005 in Bucca, and was also a former officer in Saddam's army. He was the head of a shura council in IS, before he was killed by the Iraqi army near Mosul on June 4, 2014.
Camp Bucca was also home to Haji Samir, aka Haji Bakr, whose real name is Samir Abed Hamad al-Obeidi al-Dulaimi. He was a colonel in the army of the former Iraqi regime. He was detained in Bucca, and after his release, he joined al-Qaeda. He was the top man in ISIS in Syria, but was killed in Aleppo in the first week of January 2014.
According to the testimonies of US officers who worked in the prison, the administration of Camp Bucca had taken measures including the segregation of prisoners on the basis of their ideology. This, according to experts, made it possible to recruit people directly and indirectly.
Former detainees had said in documented television interviews that Bucca, which was closed down in September 2009, was akin to an "al-Qaeda school." Former detainees had said in documented television interviews that Bucca, which was closed down in September 2009, was akin to an "al-Qaeda school," where senior extremist gave lessons on explosives and suicide attacks to younger prisoners. A former prisoner named Adel Jassem Mohammed said that one of the extremists remained in the prison for two weeks only, but even so was able to recruit 25 out of 34 inmates who were there. Mohammed also said that U.S. military officials did nothing to stop the extremists from mentoring the other detainees. While Camp Bucca is the common denominator among most IS leaders, another one is the fact that a majority of them were officers in the Baathist army, which explains the ease with which the radical group has been able to infiltrate the clans and coax some of their leaders into joining its ranks.
Another noteworthy point is that none of the leaders who had emerged out of Bucca and who were subsequently killed, were killed in U.S. airstrikes, but rather at the hands of the Iraqi army, the Syrian army, or in fighting with other armed groups.
What had happened in Bucca then? What were the circumstances that made all those former detainees subsequent leaders in the extremist group? These questions require answers and serious investigations. No doubt, we will one day discover that many more leaders in the group had been detained in Bucca as well, which seems to have been more of a "terrorist academy" than a prison.
The final point that cannot be ignored is that the creation of ISIS has greatly weakened al-Qaeda.
This article is an edited translation from the Arabic Edition.

A flag of the Islamic State (IS) is seen on the other side of a bridge at the frontline of fighting between Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Islamist militants in Rashad, on the road between Kirkuk and Tikrit, on September 11, 2014. (Photo: AFP-JM Lopez)

By: Mohammed Mahmoud Mortada
Published Saturday, September 13, 2014

Beyond conspiracy theories which are often justified in an era where everything appears as though it is part of a plan or a scheme we have the right to ask why the majority of the leaders of the Islamic State (IS), formerly the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), had all been incarcerated in the same prison at Camp Bucca, which was run by the US occupation forces near Omm Qasr in southeastern Iraq.
In the context of conspiracy theories, there are a lot of rumors about links between IS and the US intelligence or affiliated organizations. But to what extent are these theories credible? Is there evidence that corroborate them?
These questions seem legitimate, provided that ready-made answers are not accepted without convincing evidence. However, it is difficult to get this kind of evidence, and we might need another Edward Snowden or WikiLeaks to learn the real truth about the relationship between IS and US intelligence.
Yet not having this evidence should not prevent us from trying to gather some clues that may not amount to definitive evidence, but which will no doubt question the narrative that fully exonerates US intelligence from involvement with the jihadis.
First of all, most IS leaders had passed through the former U.S. detention facility at Camp Bucca in Iraq. So who were the most prominent of these detainees?
Abu Ayman al-Iraqi… also "graduated" from Camp Bucca, and currently serves as a member on IS' military council. The leader of IS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, tops the list. He was detained from 2004 until mid-2006. After he was released, he formed the Army of Sunnis, which later merged with the so-called Mujahideen Shura Council. What happened during Baghdadi's detention in Bucca remains a mystery. Some press reports said he had been detained as a "civilian" in prison for 10 months in 2004, while other reports stated he was captured by the US forces in 2005 and held for four years at Camp Bucca. This latter possibility is unlikely, given that Baghdadi had formed the Army of Sunnis and joined the Mujahideen Shura Council shortly before the assassination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June 2006. This is while bearing in mind that this council was established in January 2006, which makes it more likely that Baghdadi had been released either in late 2005 or early 2006.
It should be noted that after the Army of the Sunnis merged with the Mujahideen Shura Council, the Americans were able to successfully hunt down the leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq, starting with Zarqawi in 2006, and not ending with Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Hamza al-Muhajir in 2010, the death of the former being the event that paved the way for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to become the organization's leader.
Another prominent IS leader today is Abu Ayman al-Iraqi, who was a former officer in the Iraqi army under Saddam Hussein. This man also "graduated" from Camp Bucca, and currently serves as a member on IS' military council.
Another member of the military council who was in Bucca is Adnan Ismail Najm. He was known as Osama al-Bilawi (Abu Abdul_Rahman al-Bilawi). IS named the operation for the "invasion of Mosul" after him. He was detained on January 2005 in Bucca, and was also a former officer in Saddam's army. He was the head of a shura council in IS, before he was killed by the Iraqi army near Mosul on June 4, 2014.
Camp Bucca was also home to Haji Samir, aka Haji Bakr, whose real name is Samir Abed Hamad al-Obeidi al-Dulaimi. He was a colonel in the army of the former Iraqi regime. He was detained in Bucca, and after his release, he joined al-Qaeda. He was the top man in ISIS in Syria, but was killed in Aleppo in the first week of January 2014.
According to the testimonies of US officers who worked in the prison, the administration of Camp Bucca had taken measures including the segregation of prisoners on the basis of their ideology. This, according to experts, made it possible to recruit people directly and indirectly.
Former detainees had said in documented television interviews that Bucca, which was closed down in September 2009, was akin to an "al-Qaeda school." Former detainees had said in documented television interviews that Bucca, which was closed down in September 2009, was akin to an "al-Qaeda school," where senior extremist gave lessons on explosives and suicide attacks to younger prisoners. A former prisoner named Adel Jassem Mohammed said that one of the extremists remained in the prison for two weeks only, but even so was able to recruit 25 out of 34 inmates who were there. Mohammed also said that U.S. military officials did nothing to stop the extremists from mentoring the other detainees. While Camp Bucca is the common denominator among most IS leaders, another one is the fact that a majority of them were officers in the Baathist army, which explains the ease with which the radical group has been able to infiltrate the clans and coax some of their leaders into joining its ranks.
Another noteworthy point is that none of the leaders who had emerged out of Bucca and who were subsequently killed, were killed in U.S. airstrikes, but rather at the hands of the Iraqi army, the Syrian army, or in fighting with other armed groups.
What had happened in Bucca then? What were the circumstances that made all those former detainees subsequent leaders in the extremist group? These questions require answers and serious investigations. No doubt, we will one day discover that many more leaders in the group had been detained in Bucca as well, which seems to have been more of a "terrorist academy" than a prison.
The final point that cannot be ignored is that the creation of ISIS has greatly weakened al-Qaeda.
This article is an edited translation from the Arabic Edition.

http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/mys...is-leaders

Some Wikileaks here:
https://search.wikileaks.org/?q=bucca

[David Guyatt]

Ah-ha! Now I fully comprehend the media spawn campaign against IS.

Hat's off to Robert Parry as his below article unveils a vital and hitherto (for me anyway) concealed aspect of the new Obama strategy against IS.

Regime change is back on the agenda in Syria. And it makes hellish sense. Sending US bombers across the border in Syria to attack IS without Syrian co-ordination (agreement) will openly breach Syria's sovereignty and result in Syria firing on US aircraft. This, in turn, will give Obama the media justification he needs to take out Assad = create a problem, solve a problem. It's very cunning. How will Russia and China respond, I wonder.

Neocons Revive Syria Regime Change' Plan

September 11, 2014

Exclusive: President Obama plans to violate international law by launching airstrikes inside Syria without that government's consent, even though Syria might well give it. Is Obama playing into neocon hands by providing a new argument for "regime change" in Damascus, asks Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Official Washington's ever-influential neoconservatives and their "liberal interventionist" allies see President Barack Obama's decision to extend U.S. airstrikes against Islamic State terrorists into Syria as a new chance to achieve the long-treasured neocon goal of "regime change" in Damascus.
On the surface, Obama's extraordinary plan to ignore Syrian sovereignty and attack across the border has been viewed as a unilateral U.S. action to strike at the terrorist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), but it could easily evolve into a renewed effort to overthrow Bashar al-Assad's government, ironically one of ISIS's principal goals.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden meet with members of the National Security Council in the Situation Room of the White House, Sept. 10, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

ISIS began as part of the Sunni resistance to George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq which had elevated Iraq's Shiite majority to power. Then known as "al-Qaeda in Iraq," the terrorist group stoked a sectarian war by slaughtering Shiites and bombing their mosques.
Changing its name to ISIS, the group shifted to Syria where it joined with U.S.-backed rebels seeking to overthrow Assad's regime which was dominated by Alawites, a branch of Shiite Islam. Then, this summer, ISIS returned to Iraq where it routed Iraqi government forces in a series of battles and conducted public executions, including beheading two U.S. journalists.
In his national address Wednesday, Obama said he will order U.S. air attacks across Syria's border without any coordination with the Syrian government, a proposition that Damascus has denounced as a violation of its sovereignty. Thus, the argument will surely soon be heard in Washington that Assad's government must be removed as a military prerequisite so the attacks on ISIS can proceed. Otherwise, there could be a threat to U.S. aircraft from Syria's air defenses.
That would get the neocons back on their original track of forcing "regime change" in countries seen as hostile to Israel. The first target was Iraq with Syria and Iran to follow. The goal was to deprive Israel's close-in enemies, Lebanon's Hezbollah and Palestine's Hamas, of crucial support. The neocon vision got knocked off track when Bush's Iraq War derailed and the American people balked at the idea of extending the conflict to Syria and Iran.
But the neocons never gave up on their vision. They simply kept at it, clinging to key positions inside Official Washington and recruiting "liberal interventionists" to the "regime change" cause. The neocons remained focused on Syria and Iran with hopes of getting U.S. bombing campaigns going against both countries. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Dangerous Neocon-R2P Alliance."]
The neocons' new hope has now arrived with the public outrage over ISIS's atrocities. Yet, while pushing to get this new war going, the neocons have downplayed their "regime change" agenda, getting Obama to agree only to extend his anti-ISIS bombing campaign from Iraq into Syria. But "regime change" in Damascus has remained a top neocon priority.
In a New York Times op-ed on Aug. 29, neocon Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham avoided the "r-c" phrase couching their words about Syria's civil war in the vague language of resolving the conflict, but clearly meaning that Assad must go.
The hawkish pair wrote that thwarting ISIS "requires an end to the [civil] conflict in Syria, and a political transition there, because the regime of President Bashar al-Assad will never be a reliable partner against ISIS; in fact, it has abetted the rise of ISIS, just as it facilitated the terrorism of ISIS' predecessor, Al Qaeda in Iraq."
Though the McCain-Graham depiction of Assad's relationship to ISIS and al-Qaeda is a distortion at best in fact, Assad's army has been the most effective force in pushing back against the Sunni terrorist groups that have come to dominate the Western-backed rebel movement the op-ed's underlying point is obvious: an initial step in the U.S. military operation against ISIS must be "regime change" in Damascus.
[B]Neocon Sleight-of-Hand[/B]
[B]The neocons are also back to their old sleight-of-hand conflating the terrorists fighting the Assad government with the Assad government. In the op-ed, McCain and Graham cite Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson supposedly calling "Syria a matter of homeland security'" when he actually said in the linked speech from last February:[/B]
[B]"We are very focused on foreign fighters heading to Syria. Based on our work and the work of our international partners, we know individuals from the U.S., Canada and Europe are traveling to Syria to fight in the conflict. At the same time, extremists are actively trying to recruit Westerners, indoctrinate them, and see them return to their home countries with an extremist mission."[/B]
[B]In other words, "Syria" was not the problem cited by Johnson but rather the "foreign fighters heading to Syria" and the possibility that they might "return to their home countries with an extremist mission." The distinction is important, but McCain and Graham want to blur the threat to confuse Americans into seeing "Syria" as the problem, not the extremists.[/B]
[B]A similar approach was taken by Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, one of the Obama administration's top liberal war hawks. On Sept. 4, she sought to conflate recent allegations that Assad may not have surrendered all his chemical weapons with the possibility that any remaining weapons might fall into the hands of ISIS terrorists.[/B]
[B]"Certainly if there are chemical weapons left in Syria, there will be a risk" that they could end up in the hands of ISIS, Power said. "And we can only imagine what a group like that would do if in possession of such a weapon."[/B]
[B]If any of these rhetorical tactics are ringing a bell, it's because they are reminiscent of how the neocons frightened the American people into supporting the Iraq War in 2002-03. Back then, Bush administration officials blended unsubstantiated claims about Iraq's WMDs with the prospect of them being shared with al-Qaeda.[/B]
[B]In both cases Iraq then and Syria now the existence of those dangerous chemical weapons was in serious doubt and, even if they did exist, the two governments of Saddam Hussein then and Bashar al-Assad now were hostile to the Sunni fundamentalists in al-Qaeda and now its spinoff, ISIS.[/B]
[B]Yet, this effort to confuse the American public by manipulating their lack of knowledge about the power relationships in the Middle East might work once more, by putting "black hats" on both Assad and ISIS and blurring the fact that they are bitter enemies.[/B]
[B]In the weeks ahead, Assad also will surely be portrayed as obstructing the U.S. attacks on ISIS. He likely will be blamed for a lack of cooperation with the airstrikes even though it was the Obama administration that refused to coordinate with Assad's government.[/B]
[B][B]ISIL or ISIS?[/B][/B]
[B][B]Among anti-neocon "realists" inside the U.S. intelligence community, the concern about how these airstrikes into Syria might lead to dangerous mission creep is so great that I'm told that some senior analysts are even suspicious of President Obama's repeated use of the acronym "ISIL" for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant instead of the more common "ISIS," referring only to Iraq and Syria.[/B][/B]
[B][B]The concern is that "the Levant" suggests a larger area including all "Mediterranean lands east of Italy," that theoretically could include everything from Turkey to Palestine and Jordan to parts of Egypt. One source said inclusion of the phrase "ISIL," instead of "ISIS," in any "use of force" resolution could be significant by creating a possibility of a much wider war.[/B][/B]
[B][B]In his speech to the nation on Wednesday, Obama continued to use the acronym "ISIL" but his references to U.S. military operations were limited to Iraq and Syria.[/B][/B]
[B][B]The most controversial part of Obama's speech was his open declaration to conduct cross-border attacks into Syria in clear violation of international law. He also vowed to increase military support for rebels fighting to overthrow the Assad government.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Obama declared that "we have ramped up our military assistance to the Syrian opposition" and he requested additional resources from Congress. He added: "We must strengthen the opposition as the best counterweight to extremists like ISIL, while pursuing the political solution necessary to solve Syria's crisis once and for all," a further suggestion that "regime change" is again in play.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Exactly what Obama thinks he can get from the Syrian opposition is a mystery, since he himself stated in an interview just last month that the notion that arming the supposedly "moderate" rebels would have made a difference in Syria has "always been a fantasy."[/B][/B]
[B][B]He told the New York Times' Thomas L. Friedman: "This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards."[/B][/B]
[B][B]Nevertheless, Obama has now trotted out that old "fantasy" in connection with his plan to extend the war against ISIS into Syria. Obama also knows that many of the previous Syrian "moderates" who received U.S. weapons later unveiled themselves to be Islamists who repudiated the U.S.-backed opposition and allied themselves with al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, al-Nusra Front. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Syrian Rebels Embrace Al-Qaeda."][/B][/B]
[B][B][B]What's Up?[/B][/B][/B]
[B][B]Given that record and Obama's knowledge of it what is one to make of the deceptive formulation that he presented to the American people on Wednesday night?[/B][/B]
[B][B]One explanation could be that Obama plans a more direct albeit secretive U.S. role in removing Assad and putting a new regime into power in Damascus. Or Obama might be simply pandering to the neocons and liberal hawks who would have gone berserk if he had acknowledged the obvious, that the smart play is to work quietly with Assad to defeat ISIS and al-Nusra Front.[/B][/B]
[B][B]The other smart play might be for Obama to resume his behind-the-scenes cooperation with Russian President Vladimir Putin who helped engineer Syria's agreement to surrender its chemical weapons arsenal last year and who could presumably broker a quiet agreement between Obama and Assad to allow the U.S. airstrikes now.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Though the U.S. neocons and "liberal interventionists" exploited the Ukraine crisis to drive a wedge between the two leaders, Obama might want to reconsider that estrangement and accept the help of Russia as well as Iran in achieving a goal that they all agree on: defeating ISIS and other Sunni terrorist groups. [See Consortiumnews.com's "What Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis."][/B][/B]
[B][B]Yet, in Wednesday's speech, Obama seemed to go out of his way to insult Putin by decrying "Russian aggression" in Ukraine where the U.S. government has accused Moscow of violating Ukraine's sovereignty by crossing the border into eastern Ukraine and aiding ethnic Russian rebels.Obama claimed that Washington's own intervention in Ukraine was "in support of the Ukrainian peoples' right to determine their own destiny."[/B][/B]
[B][B]Yet the realities in Kiev, whose government is backed by the U.S., and in Damascus, whose government is despised by Washington, have eerie parallels. In Syria, Assad, a longtime dictator, won a recent election that was truncated by civil strife. In Ukraine, the current government was established by a February coup d'etat that overthrew an elected president and is now headed by a president elected by only a portion of the population, excluding much of the rebellious east.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Yet, in one country Ukraine the United States says outside intervention even by a neighbor to protect a population under military assault is illegal "aggression," while in the other country Syria it is entirely okay for the United States to send its military halfway around the world, cross Syria's borders to carry out bombing raids while also arming militants to overthrow the internationally recognized government.[/B][/B]
[B][B]Typically, neither Obama nor the U.S. mainstream press made note of the hypocrisy. But the bigger question now is will the neocons hijack Obama's bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria to achieve one of their most beloved goals, regime change in Damascus.[/B][/B]

[Magda Hassan]

Definitely they want Assad gone and replaced with puppet of choice. Syrian Army is the one who has been fighting ISIS all these 3 years. If the US was genuine they'd be allies.

[Tracy Riddle]

They really want to break up all of these countries - from North Africa to Pakistan, from Turkey to Sudan - into little, tiny, helpless, dependent states that can be dominated by the West. Countries about the size of Bahrain, UAE and Qatar.

[Magda Hassan]

Balkanisation. Divide and rule. Favourite tried and true tactic of the Anglo empire.

[David Guyatt]

Pentagon: US ground troops may join Iraqis in combat against Isis

Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel and General Martin Dempsey refuse to rule out greater role for US advisers' if airstrikes
Live blog: Congress hears Pentagon testimony on Isis

• Spencer Ackerman in New York
  
• The Guardian, Tuesday 16 September 2014 19.50 BST
  
• Jump to comments (1233)
  

Secretary of defence Chuck Hagel and Army General Martin Dempsey before the Senate armed services committee.

The Pentagon leadership suggested to a Senate panel on Tuesday that US ground troops may directly join Iraqi forces in combat against the Islamic State (Isis), despite US president Barack Obama's repeated public assurances against US ground combat in the latest Middle Eastern war.
A day after US warplanes expanded the war south-west of Baghdad, Army General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate armed services committee that he could see himself recommending the use of some US military forces now in Iraq to embed within Iraqi and Kurdish units to take territory away from Isis.
"If we reach the point where I believe our advisers should accompany Iraqi troops on attacks against specific [Isis] targets, I will recommend that to the president," Dempsey said, preferring the term "close combat advising".
It was the most thorough public acknowledgement yet from Pentagon leaders that the roughly 1,600 US troops Obama has deployed to Iraq since June may in fact be used in a ground combat role, something Obama has directly ruled out, most recently in a televised speech last week.
Dempsey, who has for years warned about the "unintended consequences" of Americanizing the Syrian civil war that gave rise to Isis, said he envisioned "close combat advising" for operations on the order of taking Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, away from Isis.
He also opened the door to using US "advisers" to call in air strikes from the ground, something Dempsey said they have thus far not done but which the US Central Command leader, General Lloyd Austin, initially thought would be necessary when pushing Isis away from the Mosul Dam last month.
"He shares my view that there will be circumstances when we think that'll be necessary, but we haven't encountered one yet," said Dempsey, himself a veteran of the last Iraq war.
Obama's prohibition on ground forces in a combat role was less ironclad than the president has publicly stated, Dempsey suggested.
"At this point, his stated policy is we will not have US ground forces in direct combat," Dempsey said, to include spotting for US air strikes. "But he has told me as well to come back to him on a case-by-case basis."
Joined by Defense secretary Chuck Hagel, Dempsey said the latest US war in Iraq, and soon in Syria, will last several years and will not resemble the "shock and awe" aerial bombardment that characterized the opening phase of the 2003 US invasion.
Isis's ultimate defeat will be a "generational" effort, Dempsey said, during which "moderate" Muslims abandon its ideology raising questions about what the US military's actual endpoint will be in pursuing the goal of "degrading and ultimately defeating" Isis, Obama's stated goal.
Dempsey and Hagel, who described the US as being "at war" with Isis, were more thorough to the committee about US strategy in Iraq than against Isis in Syria, where Dempsey said "two-thirds" of its estimated 31,000 fighters currently are.
In Iraq, the US intends to build upon the 162 air strikes it has launched since August 8, in support of Iraqi and Kurdish ground forces' efforts to take Iraqi territory away from Isis and "restore the border" with Syria, Dempsey said.
In Syria, the US is seeking to train "vetted" Syrian rebels to capture Syrian territory from Isis. Hagel and Dempsey acknowledged that an initial cohort of 5,000 Syrian opposition forces would not be ready until eight months at the earliest. The House of Representatives plans to attach authorization for the training mission to a must-pass stopgap funding bill with a vote on Wednesday which will represent the most robust congressional debate thus far on a new Iraq-Syria war.
"Five thousand is not going to be able to turn the tide, we recognize that," Hagel said. Neither he nor Dempsey ruled out requesting additional authorities and funding for building a Syrian proxy army in the future.
Dempsey said he hopes enlist unnamed Sunni Arab nations with "very considerable" special operations forces to sustain the Syrian rebel army on the ground, possibly a reference to Qatar. He and Hagel demurred when asked by Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican and Congress's most prominent hawk, if the US's new allies would receive American air cover if attacked by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
"We're not there yet, but our focus is on Isil," another name for Isis, Hagel said.
Dempsey whose resignation McCain has called for, owing to the general's reluctance to use the US military against Assad conceded that "if we were to take [fighting] Assad off the table, we'd have a much more difficult time" persuading Syrians to join the coalition, but said the administration nevertheless has an "Isil-first strategy".
McCain said relying on the Syrian opposition to prioritize fighting Isis ahead of Assad, their primary foe, pointed to a "fundamental fallacy" in the Obama administration's strategy.
On Wednesday, Obama will meet with Austin in Tampa, where Central Command is headquartered. Hagel said the general will brief Obama on upcoming "targeted actions against [Isis] safe havens in Syria", the clearest signal yet of an imminent expansion of air strikes into Syria. On the targeting list, Hagel said, are Isis "command and control, logistics capabilities, and infrastructure".
Dempsey said introducing US ground forces into Syria in support of its proxy rebel army would not yield lasting gains, part of his argument that defeating Isis the administration's stated ultimate goal will only result from a "generational" decision by regional Sunni Arabs to reject its ideology.
"I don't think that even if we were to go in on the ground, armored divisions with flags unfurled, I don't think we would do anything more than push this problem further to the right," Dempsey told Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican.
"If we don't get the kind of coalition I'm describing, then we're into a very narrow CT framework, in my view," Dempsey said, referencing frequent but intermittent drone strikes against counterterrorism targets the US has launched in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Some senators of both parties expressed discomfort with Obama's willingness to involve the US in a new war ahead of explicit congressional authorization. Deb Fischer, a Nebraska Republican, and Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, both said Congress should not end its pre-election session this month without a war vote. Manchin was one of relatively few senators on the panel who appeared inclined to vote against the latest US war in the Middle East.

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[David Guyatt]

Dennis Kucinich tells it like it is. From the Huffington Post:

Dennis J. Kucinich Become a fan Former 16-year member of the U.S. Congress and two-time U.S. presidential candidate

Stop Calling the Iraq War a 'Mistake'

Posted: 06/16/2014 11:05 am EDT Updated: 08/16/2014 5:59 am EDT

As Iraq descends into chaos again, more than a decade after "Mission Accomplished," media commentators and politicians have mostly agreed upon calling the war a "mistake." But the "mistake" rhetoric is the language of denial, not contrition: it minimizes the Iraq War's disastrous consequences, removes blame, and deprives Americans of any chance to learn from our generation's foreign policy disaster. The Iraq War was not a "mistake" -- it resulted from calculated deception. The painful, unvarnished fact is that we were lied to. Now is the time to have the willingness to say that.
In fact, the truth about Iraq was widely available, but it was ignored. There were no WMD. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. The war wasn't about liberating the Iraqi people. I said this in Congress in 2002. Millions of people who marched in America in protest of the war knew the truth, but were maligned by members of both parties for opposing the president in a time of war -- and even leveled with the spurious charge of "not supporting the troops."
I've written and spoken widely about this topic, so today I offer two ways we can begin to address our role:
1) President Obama must tell us the truth about Iraq and the false scenario that caused us to go to war.
When Obama took office in 2008, he announced that his administration would not investigate or prosecute the architects of the Iraq War. Essentially, he suspended public debate about the war. That may have felt good in the short term for those who wanted to move on, but when you're talking about a war initiated through lies, bygones can't be bygones.
The unwillingness to confront the truth about the Iraq War has induced a form of amnesia which is hazardous to our nation's health. Willful forgetting doesn't heal, it opens the door to more lying. As today's debate ensues about new potential military "solutions" to stem violence in Iraq, let's remember how and why we intervened in Iraq in 2003.
2) Journalists and media commentators should stop giving inordinate air and print time to people who were either utterly wrong in their support of the war or willful in their calculations to make war.
By and large, our Fourth Estate accepted uncritically the imperative for war described by top administration officials and congressional leaders. The media fanned the flames of war by not giving adequate coverage to the arguments against military intervention.
President Obama didn't start the Iraq War, but he has the opportunity now to tell the truth. That we were wrong to go in. That the cause of war was unjust. That more problems were created by military intervention than solved. That the present violence and chaos in Iraq derives from the decision which took America to war in 2003. More than a decade later, it should not take courage to point out the Iraq war was based on lies.

[Michael Barwell]

Unintended consequences. The hystorical verdict won't be "That went well".