ISIS militants attack and take over Iraqi northern city of Mosul

[St. Pats]

If the US had any brains they would have done a partition of Iraq long ago. Three countries instead of one with the Sunni's, Shia's and Kurds all calling their own shots.

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by St. Pats

If the US had any brains they would have done a partition of Iraq long ago. Three countries instead of one with the Sunni's, Shia's and Kurds all calling their own shots.

Has that approach ever worked?


I can't seem to recall a postive example of a third party partitioning a country or people(s).

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by St. Pats

If the US had any brains they would have done a partition of Iraq long ago. Three countries instead of one with the Sunni's, Shia's and Kurds all calling their own shots.

This wouldn't have worked, you would have a three country war happening now instead of an insurgency.

Or three countries helping insurgencies in the other countries.

[jofillips]

I wonder how the kurd militias are doing? Are they currently in a full on war with ISIS or is the conflict occuring only in the sunni/shi-ite areas?

The loose impression i got is that they're they best organized group in iraq...

[FlamesAddiction]

Originally Posted by undercoverbrother

Has that approach ever worked?


I can't seem to recall a postive example of a third party partitioning a country or people(s).

Does Kosovo count? It was a referendum, but it was forced from NATO and the EU.

With Iraq, it's complicated too because the Kurds spill over into a few other countries and if they are given a homeland from Iraqi territory, Kurds in Turkey, Iran and Syria will want referendums as well. which would in all likelihood be a disaster. Istanbul is geographically and economically tied to Europe and has about 3 million Kurds.

The best you could try to do is create a "Switzerland" in the ME, but it's hard to envision such a thing working. The EU has recently tried a similar tactic in Bosnia and the jury is still out on whether or not it can work long term.

[Knut]

Originally Posted by jofillips

I wonder how the kurd militias are doing? Are they currently in a full on war with ISIS or is the conflict occuring only in the sunni/shi-ite areas?

The loose impression i got is that they're they best organized group in iraq...

http://www.economist.com/news/middle...d-jihad-across

Found this article pretty informative in regards to all the factors at play and the groups involved.. It does seem like the Kurds in Iraq have the best militia.

[jofillips]

thanks for the economist link, as always a great source.
From that article i take a little more faith that ISIS can be stopped or driven back - the kurds won't just let them in by the looks of it.
Even a few months ago the economist was reporting on how locals in Syria were determined to drive ISIS out, how the majority hated their extremism.

So if this is a new caliphate does it mean we'll see a new muslim pope/grand mufti?
I think it was abandoned after the 1st world war from what i remember...

[Knut]

Reddit does a good job summarizing things.

Here is the latest thread on it.

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/co...ead_sticky_10/

Seems like the Kurds could be the be big winners out of this with an independent Oil-rich Kurdistan.

[nik-]

ISIS sounds like the Jihadi groups' Tea Party.

[nik-]

Also, this is the best part

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...ror-group.html

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction

The best you could try to do is create a "Switzerland" in the ME, but it's hard to envision such a thing working. The EU has recently tried a similar tactic in Bosnia and the jury is still out on whether or not it can work long term.

Also, all the chocolate would melt

[jofillips]

or you could try sheldon from big bang theory answer; move 'Israel' into the mexican desert!

[Tinordi]

What do you do with near-clinical fanatics who, in their own minds, never make mistakes and whose worldview remains intact even after it has been empirically dismantled in front of their eyes? In real life, you try and get them to get professional help.
In the case of those who only recently sent thousands of American servicemembers to their deaths in a utopian scheme to foment a democracy in a sectarian dictatorship, we have to merely endure their gall in even appearing in front of the cameras. But the extent of their pathology is deeper than one might expect. And so there is actually a seminar this fall, sponsored by the Hertog Foundation, which explores the origins of the terrible decision-making that led us into the worst foreign policy mistake since Vietnam. And the fair and balanced teaching team?

It will be led by Paul D. Wolfowitz, who served during the Persian Gulf War as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and as Deputy Secretary of Defense during the first years of the Iraq War, and by Lewis Libby, who served during the first war as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and during the Iraq War as Chief of Staff and National Security Adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Next spring: how the Iraq War spread human rights … by Donald Rumsfeld.

Most people are aware that relatively few of the architects of a war have fully acknowledged the extent of their error – let alone express remorse or even shame at the more than a hundred thousands civilian deaths their adventure incurred for a phony reason. No, all this time, they have been giving each other awards, lecturing congressmen and Senators, writing pieces in the Weekly Standard and the New Republic, being fellated by David Gregory, and sucking at the teet of the neocon welfare state, as if they had nothing to answer for, and nothing to explain.

Which, I suppose makes the following paragraph in Bill Kristol’s latest case for war less shocking than it should be:

Now is not the time to re-litigate either the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 or the decision to withdraw from it in 2011. The crisis is urgent, and it would be useful to focus on a path ahead rather than indulge in recriminations. All paths are now fraught with difficulties, including the path we recommend. But the alternatives of permitting a victory for al Qaeda and/or strengthening Iran would be disastrous.

But it is shocking; it is, in fact, an outrage, a shameless, disgusting abdication of all responsibility for the past combined with a sickening argument to do exactly the same fricking thing all over again. And yes, I’m not imagining. This is what these true know-nothing/learn-nothing fanatics want the US to do:

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/...ristol-meth-2/

[Tinordi]

Andrew Sullivan is on a role, and is totally right.

The events in Iraq have unveiled the core reality of that country’s sectarian vortex, but they’ve also revealed something just as disturbing at home. Far from feeling any remorse, or expressing the slightest regret, or analyzing their own catastrophic misjudgments, the architects of the Iraq disaster are actually proud of the devastation they caused for no reason. To read Tony Blair is to witness a mind unsullied by fact or history or responsibility. There is not a scintilla of the self-awareness – let alone the shame – that one might expect from any responsible adult. I have to say Boris Johnson gets it exactly right:

I have come to the conclusion that Tony Blair has finally gone mad. He wrote an essay published last week that struck me as unhinged in its refusal to face facts. In discussing the disaster of modern Iraq he made assertions that are so jaw-droppingly and breathtakingly at variance with reality that he surely needs professional psychiatric help.

If Blair needs help, what can we say of Paul Bremer – yes, Paul Bremer, the man who disbanded the Iraqi military – actually having the gall to go on CNN and blame Obama for his own responsibility for hundreds of thousands of deaths? We have Bill Kristol – with a straight face – actually going on cable news and arguing that not only does the US have to intervene, but that we have to fight both Iran and ISIS and Maliki simultaneously. He actually then has the gall to ask that we do not re-litigate his own record in fomenting this bloodbath! Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby are teaching a course on wartime leadership! James Fallows is far too kind.

And now the country’s resident and proud war criminal, with his failed politician daughter, are in on the act. As you might expect, theirs is a poisonous little tract, asserting ludicrously that Iraq was a victory, denying any responsibility for introducing extreme Islamism into Iraq, parlaying their own cronies in the Middle East as representative of anything but their own bubble, and blaming everything, as usual, on the man who has steadfastly managed to de-leverage the US from the Bush-Cheney catastrophe.

The Cheneys have indeed been slamming the Kristol meth. And they do so, as usual, by insinuating the president is on the side of our enemies. Take this disgusting sentence:

Despite clear evidence of the dire need for American leadership around the world, the desperation of our allies and the glee of our enemies, President Obama seems determined to leave office ensuring he has taken America down a notch.

This from the man who left office with a cratering economy, two lost wars, a bankrupted Treasury, and a record of torture and military incompetence unknown in modern American history.

What we’re seeing now is the inability of the neocon mind to adjust even a smidgen in the face of empirical reality, to absorb just a soupçon of history, to accept even a minimum of responsibility. Mercifully, the American public is not drinking the same poisonous Kool-Aid twice:

According to a Public Policy Polling survey released Tuesday, 54 percent of voters say they agree more with the president on Iraq, compared with 28 percent who said they agree more with McCain.

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/...ish-today-182/

[Tinordi]

Not to beat a dead horse but it seems that alot of people are getting their nose out of joint that former neocons are coming out of the woodwork with the gall to criticize the Obama administration in what's happened since.

Ezra Klein:

http://www.vox.com/2014/6/17/5817910...ampaign=buffer

A decade later Iraq is becoming the things it was meant to destroy. It could become a #####e dominated state dependent on Iran for its security. It could become a weak or broken state that serves partly as a haven for the Sunni terror organization ISIS. It could end up as both.

The one thing it will not be is the liberal, democratic counterweight to radical Islam that the Bush administration sought. There is no one in the Middle East who looks to the Iraqi state and sees a better life for them and their children.

The totality of the Bush administration's failure in Iraq is stunning. It is not simply that they failed to build the liberal democracy they wanted. It's that they ended up strengthening theocracies they feared.

And it's not simply that they failed to find the weapons of mass destruction that they worried could one day be passed onto terrorists. It's that a terrorist organization now controls a territory about the size of Belgium, raising the possibility that America's invasion and occupation inadvertently trained the fighters and created the vacuum that will lead to al Qaeda's successor organization.

And all this cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives.

[jofillips]

is this the anti-war group of '03 way of being smug? Seeing the thing they hated (iraq) going down in smoke and recrimination and jihadiism?
I agree blaming Obama is dumb here but going over Bush and rumsfeld doesn't change a damn thing...

[Tinordi]

Originally Posted by jofillips

is this the anti-war group of '03 way of being smug? Seeing the thing they hated (iraq) going down in smoke and recrimination and jihadiism?
I agree blaming Obama is dumb here but going over Bush and rumsfeld doesn't change a damn thing...

No but it's setting the historical record straight which is invaluably important - be it smug or not. One group of ideological, condescending and ultimately no-nothing morons emboldened by the reverberations in their echo chamber led a trillion dollar war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and made the security of the U.S. and a whole region worse off now and likely for generations. Those people should rightly have the full weight of history and criticism heavily levied against them for posterity's sake at least.

How would you feel if you were the family of a loved soldier who was killed in Iraq? Would you think their sacrifice was worth the ideological priors of an administration unhinged from reason and accountability? Would you feel like it's appropriate now for those people to start chiming in trying not only to absolve themselves of blame but to shift blame to the person who was handed the smouldering ashes and had to do something with it?

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by jofillips

is this the anti-war group of '03 way of being smug? Seeing the thing they hated (iraq) going down in smoke and recrimination and jihadiism?
I agree blaming Obama is dumb here but going over Bush and rumsfeld doesn't change a damn thing...

People who proclaim themselves as experts who end up being categorically wrong should no longer be looked at as experts.

If you don't know your history, you're doomed to repeat it.

Exploring the context for hostility is the best way to find a solution to end that hostility.

[jofillips]

right war at the wrong time for all the wrong reasons.

[burn_this_city]

How can anyone say it was the right war? The right war was in 1991 if HW Bush had finished the job properly.