BREAKING UPDATE:
Military Coup In Iraq: Prime Minister Maliki Refuses To Step Down; Security
Forces On Alert, Encircle Presidential Palace
Related: Obama Reinvades Iraq
With the same old enablers at his side:
"Iraqi airstrikes could continue for months, Obama warns" by Vivian Salama and Bram Janssen | Associated Press August 10, 2014
How odd that my printed byline is by Shear and Arango of the New York Times.
KHAZER CAMP, Iraq — President Obama justified the US military’s return to fighting in Iraq on Saturday by saying America must act now to prevent genocide, protect its diplomats, and provide humanitarian aid to refugees trapped by Islamic State militants on a mountain ridge near the Syrian border.
Laying the groundwork for an extended airstrike campaign against Sunni militants in Iraq, President Barack Obama said Saturday that the strikes that had begun the day before could continue for months as the Iraqis build a new government.
First paragraph is a rewrite, although I suppose I'm nitpicking at the "extended military presence in the skies" being reformulated.
‘‘This is going to be a long-term project’’ that won’t end and can’t succeed unless Iraqis form an inclusive government in Baghdad capable of keeping the country from breaking apart, Obama said at the White House.
And how much is all this going to cost while we at home are under the lashing whip of government-enforced austerity?
“I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem in weeks,” Obama told reporters before leaving for a two-week vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. “This is going to be a long-term project.”
Related: Obama Golfs While World Burns
Also see (except you can't; it's a printed photograph not found in the web version):
"VACATION TIME -- President Obama played a round with former NFL player Ahmad Rashad at Farm Neck Golf Club in Oak Bluffs on Saturday. Obama, his wife, Michelle, their daughter Malia, and dogs Bo and Sunny arrived on Martha's Vineyard for their annual vacation, and the president spent about 30 minutes at their rented vacation home before taking off for the golf course (Boston Globe August 10 2014)."
US planes and drones launched more airstrikes on Islamic State forces Sunday. US Central Command said the strikes destroyed armed vehicles, including one that was firing on Kurdish forces in the approaches to the city of Irbil, and a mortar position. The military said the airstrikes took place from about 2:15 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time Sunday to about 5:45 a.m.
The president repeated his insistence that the United States would not send ground combat troops back to Iraq. But....
They are already there.
You see what I am doing here, right? I'm paralleling the paragraphs, though I would soon find a complete rewrite.
It was the fourth round of airstrikes against Islamic State forces by the U.S. military since they were authorized by President Barack Obama
The military support also has been helping clear the way for aid flights to drop food and water to thousands of starving refugees in the Sinjar area.
The president’s assessment of the campaign’s duration came as ISIS militants began advancing along a main road up Mount Sinjar, where thousands of Yazidis remained trapped. In Mosul, residents reported that nearly two dozen bodies of ISIS fighters, said to have been killed in American airstrikes, had arrived at the city’s morgue, while at least 30 wounded fighters were being treated at a hospital.
Terrorists being treated at hospital?
But the help comes too late for many of the religious minorities targeted for elimination by the Islamic State group, which swept past US-trained and equipped Iraqi government forces in recent weeks and now controls much of Iraq.
Really?!!!!!!
Saturday was the first time Mr. Obama had addressed the question of a timeline for the military intervention in Iraq, and his remarks are likely to raise new questions, especially among those who fear that the mission could slowly pull America back into a more robust involvement in the country. The president said he would not give a “particular timetable” on the new operations.
Aides said that Mr. Obama had not committed to years of continuous airstrikes while Iraqis develop a new government, but....
God damn this man.
Thanks for using the CIA to arm and train ISIS, asshole!
A delayed response by the Shi’ite-led government in Baghdad left Kurdish forces struggling to contain the Sunni extremists’ advances. With nowhere to go but uphill, Kurdish-speaking Yazidi refugees sought shelter in the mile-high Sinjar mountains, where their ancient religion holds that Noah’s ark came to rest.
Really pulling out all the stops to sell this intervention and reinvasion, 'eh?
The open-ended nature of Mr. Obama’s actions presents a tricky political problem for a president who campaigned against what he once called a “dumb war” and repeatedly pressed Republicans to set a date for the departure of American troops from the battlefield. The last American troops left Iraq in December 2011, yet Mr. Obama now finds himself in charge of a new, if very different, military operation there with no certain end in sight.
US, Iraqi, and British cargo planes dropped tons of food, water, tents, and other equipment to the refugees Friday and Saturday. Iraq’s defense ministry released a video showing people in the Sinjar mountains rushing to collect food and water as the Iraqi government’s fleet of C130 cargo planes dropped 20 tons of aid at a time.
When he announced the airstrikes on Thursday night, Mr. Obama emphasized the immediate goals of protecting Americans in Baghdad and in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq, and helping to rescue the Iraqis trapped by ISIS fighters on the mountain. In his remarks Saturday morning, he focused more on the need to help Iraqis over the long term, giving them what he called space to develop a government that can fight back against militants.
But at least 56 children have died of dehydration in the mountains, UNICEF’s spokesman in Iraq, Karim Elkorany, told The Associated Press on Saturday.
Every time the Jewish War Media waves kids at me now I think Gaza.
But his acknowledgment that the effort in Iraq will take time may not be enough to satisfy Republican critics, many of whom accuse Mr. Obama of failing to embrace a sufficiently aggressive air mission aimed at driving the militants out of Iraq and Syria.
British officials estimated Saturday between 50,000 and 150,000 people could be trapped on the mountain.
Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and Mr. Obama’s 2008 presidential opponent, said Saturday that Mr. Obama’s vision for military operations against militants in Iraq was too narrow. He said the actions ordered by the president were not nearly enough to counter a growing threat from “the richest, most powerful terrorist organization in history.”
ISIS is CIA, and if you want a war so bad John, you go f***ing fight it!
And Juan Mohammed, a local government spokesman in the Syrian city of Qamishli, told the AP that more than 20,000 starving Yazidis are fleeing across the border, braving gunfire through a tenuous ‘‘safe passage’’ that Kurdish peshmerga forces are trying to protect.
Just don't try setting one up in east Ukraine.
“Obviously, the president of the United States does not appreciate this is not just a threat to American troops on the ground, or even Iraq or Kurdistan,” Mr. McCain said in a telephone interview from Vietnam, where he was traveling with a congressional delegation. “This is a threat to America.”
So WHEN is the NUCLEAR FALSE FLAG that will obliterate Chicago, John? 9/11?
Related: With Kerry Comes Conflict
Same with McCain.
With shocked, sunburnt faces, men, women, and children in dirt-caked clothes limped to a camp for displaced Iraqis on Saturday, finding safety after harsh days of hiding on a blazing mountaintop, fleeing the Islamic State extremists.
Gaza.
In describing a potentially long time frame for military action in Iraq, Mr. Obama cited in part the danger and complexity of the rescue mission on Mount Sinjar. The military at that point had airdropped 36,224 meals to the refugees, officials said. But Mr. Obama said the much harder task of creating a safe corridor for them would take more time. “The next step, which is going to be complicated logistically, is how can we give people safe passage,” he said.
What a f***ing hypocrite.
Children who died of thirst were left behind and some exhausted mothers abandoned their babies as thousands of Yazidis trekked across a rocky mountain chain in temperatures of more than 100 degrees, crossing into neighboring Syria, and then looping back into Iraq to reach safety at the Bajid Kandala camp.
Sorry to be so insensitive, but I'm tired of f***ing mind-manipulating heartstring-pulling from a murderous war media.
This is really over the top considering all the war refugees USrael has and is creating.
Defense Department officials expressed confidence that they could achieve within a few days one of Mr. Obama’s announced goals: stopping the advance of the militants on Erbil, where hundreds of American diplomatic officials and military advisers are stationed. On Friday, the military struck a number of ISIS targets near Erbil, including a stationary convoy of seven vehicles and a mobile artillery unit that was being towed by a truck.
Other Yazidis have settled in refugee camps in Syria: So awful is their situation, they have sought safety in a country aflame in a civil war.
Anybody thank Syria for taking them in?
“We can stop them from moving into Erbil,” a senior Defense Department official said Saturday, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe military planning. “The cost will become too high. There will be a tremendous amount of deterrence in these strikes.”
The US military officially withdrew its combat forces in late 2011 after more than eight years of war. It returned to battle Friday when two F/A-18 jets dropped 500-pound bombs on Islamic State fighters advancing on the Kurdish capital of Irbil as violence sent the number of displaced Iraqis soaring.
But officials said breaking the siege on Mount Sinjar and protecting Americans in Baghdad from advancing ISIS militants would take more time, particularly given the instability of Iraq’s internal politics and the vagaries of protecting and eventually evacuating the stranded Iraqis.
Where print copy ended, and GAZA!
General Ahmed, the peshmerga spokesman at the Khazer checkpoint on the frontline outside Irbil, said it was a ‘‘good hit,’’ but the impact wasn’t yet clear. The Kurdish general spoke on condition his last name not be used.
Obama was adamant Saturday that US troops can’t bring peace to Iraq.
‘‘We can conduct airstrikes, but ultimately there’s not going to be an American military solution to this problem. There’s going to have to be an Iraqi solution that America and other countries and allies support,’’ he said.
But "we" are going to smash a bunch of shit anyway!
Obama said the length of American involvement would depend on how quickly Iraqi leaders could form a national unity government with meaningful roles for the country’s two main minority groups, Sunnis and Kurds. Without saying so explicitly, American officials have been quietly working to replace Mr. Maliki because they believe that he is incapable of uniting the country to face the militant threat.
I told you, I told you, I told you! ISIS is a VEHICLE for just such a thing!
The Pentagon said the militants were using the artillery to shell Kurdish forces defending Irbil, the capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, home to a US consulate and about three dozen US military trainers.
Mr. Obama said an inclusive government would give all Iraqis a reason to believe that they were represented, and Iraqi military forces a motive to fight back against the militants. Once that happens, he said, the American military, working with Iraqi and Kurdish fighters, can “engage in some offense.”
This man is sickening. I don't know if we can survive two more years of him.
Iraq’s embattled prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, waited until Monday to call in aerial reinforcements for Kurdish fighters trying to contain the Islamic State’s advance. It was his government’s first show of cooperation with the semi-autonomous Kurdish regional government since Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul, fell to the extremists in June.
And so Kurdish officials were particularly pleased by the return of US air support as well as the military trainers coordinating tactical responses with Kurdish peshmerga forces in Irbil.
But they are NOT COMBAT TROOPS, thank God.
Wait until the FIRST AMERICAN on the GROUND DIES!
‘‘Air strikes are intended to degrade the terrorists’ capabilities and achieve strategic gains — and have been very effective,” said Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd.
Many of America’s allies have backed the US intervention since the Yazidis’ plight gained attention. British forces are coordinating aid drops with the US and, more broadly, trying to figure out how to help the refugees escape from ‘‘a completely unacceptable situation,’’ British Defense Secretary Philip Hammond said.
In London, the British foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, said Royal Air Force planes would “imminently” begin humanitarian airdrops in northern Iraq. President François Hollande of France also pledged humanitarian support, officials said.
I'm sure their austerity-lashed citizens will love seeing that.
The Yazidis follow an ancient religion with roots in Zoroastrianism, which the Islamic State group considers heretical and has vowed to destroy. The extremist group also considers Shi’ite Muslims to be apostates and has demanded that Christians convert to Islam, pay a special tax, or be killed.
Related: Why Aren't ISIS and Al-Qaeda Attacking Israel?
Because it is USrael that created, funds, and directs them.
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Related (never saw this in print):
"Hours before Obama spoke, Sunni militants in northern Iraq ordered engineers to return to work on the Mosul Dam, the country’s largest, suggesting that the extremists who captured the dam last week after fierce battles with Kurdish forces will use it, at least for now, to provide water and electricity to the areas they control, and not as a weapon.
Prompted by the seizure of the dam by the group known as the Islamic State, along with the dire circumstances of tens of thousands of civilians stranded in the mountains near Sinjar, in northwestern Iraq, Obama quickly ordered airdrops of humanitarian aid and airstrikes on militant positions near the Kurdish capital, Irbil.
Right after Congress left for five weeks, the underhanded f***er.
As the Islamic State consolidates its control of territory, it has acted brutally, carrying out executions and forcing out minority groups. But it has also displayed an intent to act strategically when it comes to natural resources, highlighted by the call on Saturday for engineers on the dam to get back to work.
Yeah, that's one hell of a radical I$lami$t terror group. They don't attack Israel and they don't blow up oil fields, either.
The group’s control over the dam, however, also gives the group the ability to create a civilian catastrophe: A break in the fragile dam could unleash a tidal wave over the city of Mosul and cause flooding and countless deaths along the Tigris River south to Baghdad and beyond, experts have said.
In Baghdad, efforts by leaders to name a replacement for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, stalled, with rivals unable to decide on an alternative. A session of Parliament scheduled for Sunday — when leaders had been expected to nominate a new prime minister — was postponed until Monday."
I'm almost ready to do that with this post given the f***ing censorship runaround!
"US chooses military middle ground in conflict in Iraq" by Michael R. Gordon | New York Times August 10, 2014
NEW YORK — In carrying out limited airstrikes in Iraq, the Obama administration is pursuing a strategy that attempts to contain the threat posed by Islamic militants but that does not seek to break their hold on northern and western Iraq.
“This was not an authorization of a broad-based counterterrorism campaign” against the Islamic State group, a senior administration official said.
But the control that the Islamic State now exerts over eastern Syria and much of the Sunni-dominated areas of Iraq remains an enormous worry for US counterterrorism officials, who warn that this territory has become a sanctuary for jihadists who might plan attacks against the West.
Telegraphing a nuclear 9/11 he is.
This is it, folks. It was an honor serving you.
In announcing that he had authorized military strikes Thursday night, President Obama noted there was no American military solution to Iraq’s problems. And US officials have pointed out that the formation of a new multisect Iraqi government would go a long way toward easing the worries of many Sunnis and making them a less hospitable host for Islamic State militants.
But there also is no prospect of drawing the Islamic State into Iraq’s political process, and reclaiming the cities and towns lost to the militants will require an Iraqi counteroffensive far more effective than what has been shown so far. Advocates of greater American action, especially some members of Congress, call for sharing more intelligence, sending in more advisers, and ordering expanded airstrikes.
While Obama said in a recent interview with The New York Times that the United States is not going to allow the Islamic State to create a caliphate that runs through Syria and Iraq and spoke generally of his interest in working with “partners on the ground,” he has yet to articulate a detailed and systemic strategy for rolling back the Islamic State’s gains.
In remarks on Saturday before departing for vacation, Obama acknowledged that the Islamic State’s gains in recent months had been “more rapid than the intelligence estimates and, I think, the expectations of policymakers.”
On Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry indicated in a Friday news conference in Kabul that the White House was still deliberating about its long-term strategy.
“The president has taken no option off the table, and there are current discussions taking place,” Kerry said when asked whether the White House had settled for containment and avoided a more ambitious effort to roll back the Islamic State’s gains that could commence when a new Iraqi government forms.
When will that be, after the November elections?
Sorry I'm so down on this rank rot JYT war propaganda, folks. Michael Gordon is the male version of Judith Miller.
A senior Kurdish official, who asked not to be named because he was discussing internal deliberations, said Saturday Kurdish authorities had asked the Obama administration several weeks ago to provide ammunition, sniper rifles, machine guns, mortars, and other equipment for their peshmerga fighters. Though the Iraqi government had recently provided some ammunition, he said, the Americans were still assessing the Kurdish request.
“Peshmerga forces were forced to withdraw from engagements with ISIS forces because they ran out of ammunition,” said Michael D. Barbero, a retired Army lieutenant general who helped train Iraqi forces from 2009-11, referring to the Islamic State. “We should expedite this support to them.”
Another way to push back against the Islamic State would be to train and advise the Iraqi forces. The Pentagon sent about 300 Special Operations forces to Iraq to conduct an assessment of its forces, but administration officials have yet to decide whether to mount a substantial advisory effort.
Smells like Vietnam, doesn't it?
Now that American reconnaissance planes and drones have been tracking Islamic State locations, the US military also has more of the intelligence it would need if the administration elected to broaden the scope of its air attacks.
Iraqi officials first floated the idea of airstrikes a year ago, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki asked the United States to consider airstrikes in a May conversation with Vice President Joe Biden. The White House began to make clear that airstrikes were an option after the fall of Mosul in June.
They delayed all this time hoping Maliki would get tossed.
The threat the United States is confronting in the Islamic State is not new. The Islamic State was spawned out of Al Qaeda in Iraq seven years ago, the militant group that was one of the United States’s principal nemeses during the war in Iraq.
The Al Qaeda this U.S. brought there by overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
Btw, who is "Al-CIA-Duh?"
What do you mean they were made up, and created for the courtroom!?
Related:
Prop 101: Al-CIA-Duh and the OSI
Prop 101: Al-CIA-Duh's Greatest Hits
Prop 101: The "Terrorism" Business
New York Times Admits War on Terror is U.S. Creation
Oh, AmeriKa's MSM KNOWS ALL ABOUT and yet STILL PUSHES the CHARADE, huh?
Who are the "terrorists" again?
The propaganda is disgusting!
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Related: Peddler of Iraq War Lies Now Pushes Lies On Urkaine to Drum Up Confrontation with Russia
Also see: Fleeing persecution, Iraqi refugees fight to survive on mountainside" by Alissa J. Rubin | New York Times
No offense, but the Jewish War Media pulling at the heart strings just doesn't work for me anymore. Sorry.
