You said that Obama had foolishly ignored having NATO fight Syria, because Obama either didn't want to fight or just wanted a lightweight little symbolic show of force. I said that as I recalled, NATO didn't want to fight, it requires unanimity of 28 votes, some countries must get their parliaments' permission, and Britain's Parliament was opposed. You said balderdash, I was wrong, Obama could have had a nice Bush-size war had he just used NATO, but chickened out. I verified to myself that my memory was right, then bombed you to pieces in Post #47 with B-52s-full of articles saying that NATO did not have the votes to fight a war in Syria, nor did the British Parliament. Since you lost all your artillery in that post, you have been forced to use your only remaining weapons, semantic games about how you didn't really say something, and that you were really arguing about something else. That's always PapaG's strategy. You should be better than him. Actually, a bum on the street should be better than him.
Surge worked? Then why this thread? Half a million children died from American sanctions of medicine in the 1990s? Yes, that's on your warmonger side, not ours. Slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraqis? Not true, but even if true, what do you think Bush did? Plus the internecine warfare the U.S. set up so it could leave. The U.S. surpassed Saddam long ago.
NATO was never asked to consider a peacekeeping mission. The Brits were asked to join a coalition of the willing to attack Syria without NATO or the UN. The brits voted against that. You still don't get it. Obama had no intention of asking for NATO troops on the ground to keep the peace. He wanted to bomb the place and tuck tail and run like a coward. Your memory fails you, because you got it wrong.
Nah. No links at all. Here's another, from WaPost. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...51391e-f55b-11e3-a3a5-42be35962a52_story.html In 2011, the situation in Iraq was so good that the Obama administration was actually trying to take credit for it, with Vice President Joe Biden declaring that Iraq “could be one of the great achievements of this administration.” Now in 2014, as Iraq descends into chaos, Democrats are trying to blame the fiasco on — you guessed it — George W. Bush. “I don’t think this is our responsibility,” said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, declaring that the unfolding disaster in Iraq “represents the failed policies that took us down this path 10 years ago.” Sorry, but this is a mess of President Obama’s making. When Obama took office he inherited a pacified Iraq, where the terrorists had been defeated both militarily and ideologically. Militarily, thanks to Bush’s surge, coupled with the Sunni Awakening, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI, now the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS) was driven from the strongholds it had established in Anbar and other Iraqi provinces. It controlled no major territory, and its top leader — Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — had been killed by U.S. Special Operations forces. Ideologically, the terrorists had suffered a popular rejection. Iraq was supposed to be a place where al-Qaeda rallied the Sunni masses to drive America out, but instead, the Sunnis joined with Americans to drive al-Qaeda out — a massive ideological defeat. Obama took that inheritance and squandered it, with two catastrophic mistakes: First, he withdrew all U.S. forces from Iraq — allowing the defeated terrorists to regroup and reconstitute themselves. Second, he failed to support the moderate, pro-Western opposition in neighboring Syria — creating room for ISIS to fill the security vacuum. ISIS took over large swaths of Syrian territory, established a safe haven, used it to recruit and train thousands of jihadists, and prepared their current offensive in Iraq. More reality at the link.
Denny, I fear you may be in error here. Perhaps Obama is not the great fuckup he appears to be. I sometime get the impression that he is, fundamentally changing America just as he predicted. Many of us had no idea what that meant. Well now the blank is becoming an image.
The "opinion" is reality. It's one thing to try and predict the future, but he's discussing the past. 20-20 hindsight.
Fundamentalist Muslims in Egypt, Iraq, and Libya get US support via weapons and NATO when overthrowing a more sectarian govt. Sectarian opposition in Iran gets zero help against the religious govt.
I feel for the citizens of Iraq . . . I'm guessing a majority of them would rather live under a dictator like Saddam than live in the country the way it is now.
As long as they weren't Kurds or Shi'ites of course. What??? I'm guessing any Iraqi with a brain thinks they'd rather still have US troops at bases instead of the ISIS units who occupy them now after Obama had our troops desert them, and then not being smart enough to obliterate them with Tomahawks minutes after the last troop was safe on a plane.
You said that Obama should have attacked Syria using NATO. I proved with many links (I got more if you want more) that NATO didn't have the 28 votes to do it. You continue to say, through your irrelevant links (you're now up to 2 links, congrats), that Obama then said that if he did attack, he wouldn't use NATO. You keep repeating yourself. You still have no link to back up your blog-inspired tale that NATO was willing to go to war. Just admit you're wrong so you can stop getting pounded in this thread.
You're confusing "attack syria" with a peacekeeping mission for syria. So Obama blows of NATO and asks the Brits to vote on attacking Syria. Of course the Brits voted against that. They weren't given the chance to vote on peacekeeping. And I posted a link saying Obama was not interested in going the NATO route. I don't need to repeat it, you need to read it and comprehend it.
You keep talking as if Britain was the only vote against war out of 28. As my links said, there were many. One of those links: http://en.alalam.ir/news/1511451 All those articles say that NATO had "no intention of intervening," "of military action," "no action should be taken." If NATO opposed intervention after a supposed gas attack, they sure opposed replacing the existing UN peacekeeping force with a NATO force, which everyone knew was a lie, a cover for military attack, as it had been in Libya. By the way...you got any articles tallying the NATO votes to start a NATO "peacekeeping" force? Got anything to show 28 NATO votes other than an editorial from the usual American general? I sure hate to keep asking... And even if he could have bribed NATO into unanimity, Obama didn't even have the votes in Congress, not even among Republicans, to do that. Everyone sane, plus warmongers, spoke strongly against any involvement about Syria.
OK, one more time. Those articles talk about retaliation for use of chemical weapons. Obama's line in the sand. Not the same thing as a peacekeeping mission.
Obama should have done something similar to what he did in Libya. "There's genocide going on, let's put an end to that and keep the two sides from killing each other."
The link between Syria and Iraq by the UN. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/...q-syria_n_5502650.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular GENEVA, June 17 (Reuters) - The Middle East appears on the brink of wider sectarian war engulfing Iraq and Syria with radical Islamist insurgents wantonly kidnapping, torturing and killing civilians, U.N. human rights investigators said in a report on Tuesday. Militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)group have routed Baghdad's army and seized the north of Iraq in the past week, linking it with a major swathe of territory previously taken in eastern Syria during the civil war there. "We predicted a long time ago the dangers of spillover both ways, which is now becoming a regional spillover," said Vitit Muntarbhorn, an international law expert who took part in the inquiry. "We are possibly on the cusp of a regional war and that is something we're very concerned about." U.N. human rights Navi Pillay said on Monday forces allied with ISIL in northern Iraq had almost certainly committed war crimes by executing hundreds of non-combatant men over the past five days. A report presented on Tuesday to the U.N. Human Rights Council said foreign Sunni jihadi militants and funds had poured into Syria where rebel factions including ISIL were wantonly abusing civilians in zones they controlled. "A regional war in the Middle East draws ever closer. Events in neighboring Iraq will have violent repercussions for Syria," the investigators' report said.
