OBAMA BOMBS IRAQ IN ORDER TO SAVE IT After announcing authorization late Thursday, president invokes preventing genocide to justify Pentagon-confirmed airstrikes on Friday by Jon Queally U.S. warplanes fired missiles on ground targets in northern Iraq Friday, the Pentagon confirmed midday. On Thursday night (see below), President Obama announced his authorization for such strikes as he justified them on humanitarian grounds that would save Iraqis caught up in current violence in the country from a genocide. At approximately 6:45 a.m. EDT, the U.S. military conducted a targeted airstrike against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) terrorists. Two F/A-18 aircraft dropped 500-pound laser-guided bombs on a mobile artillery piece near Erbil. ISIL was using this artillery to shell Kurdish forces defending Erbil where U.S. personnel are located. Reuters reports: The Islamic State was defiant. A fighter told Reuters by telephone the U.S. air strikes would have no impact on us. The planes attack positions they think are strategic, but this is not how we operate. We are trained for guerrilla street war, he said. God is with us and our promise is heaven. When we are promised heaven, do you think death will stop us? Writing at FireDogLake on Friday morning, former US diplomat in Iraq Peter Van Buren offered an extensive and varied list of reasons why Obamas decision to bomb Iraq is a mistake. A sampling: Sunnis are not confined by the borders of Iraq and this is not a chessboard. U.S. actions toward Sunnis in Iraq (or Syria, or wherever) resonate throughout the Sunni world. There is no better recruitment tool for Sunni extremists than showing their fight is actually against the Americans. Precise, Surgical Strikes: Sure, just ask those wedding parties in Yemen and Afghanistan how that has worked out. Air strikes will not resolve anything significant. The short answer is through nine years of war and occupation U.S. air power in Iraq, employed on an unfettered scale, combined with the full-weight of the U.S. military on the ground plus billions of dollars in reconstruction funds, failed to resolve the issues now playing out in Iraq. Why would anyone think a lesser series of strikes would work any better? We also have a recent Iraqi example of the pointlessness of air strikes. The Maliki government employed them with great vigor against Sunnis in western Iraq, including in Fallujah, only six months ago, and here we are again, with an even more powerful Sunni force in the field. And appearing on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez earlier in the day, Middle East and US foreign policy expert Phyllis Bennis explained why the bombing of Iraq is exactly the wrong course of action. The question of U.S. airstrikes is almost certainly going to make things worse and not better, Bennis said. This should have been the lesson we learned from what President Obama called the dumb war. He admitted this time around there is no American military solution, and yet he’s authorizing American military actions. It doesn’t make any sense. There’s no logic to it.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 06:04:15 +0000
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