by anon » Sat Jan 04, 2014 4:28 am
Reality Check wrote:Trevor wrote:
There is one other thing that should be said on this. However tempting it would be to blame Obama for all of this (and being an Obama-hater, I wish I could) he really can't do anything else even if he wanted to. His disengagement from the world is the most popular policy he has. Americans do not want another war under any circumstances whatsoever.
The situation in Iraq would have been very different if Obama had done the right thing after the election where the non-religious coalition won the majority, and the U.S. did not support them at a time the government could not stand without U.S. intelligence and logistic support for their military.
If the U.S. had thrown their support behind the democratic coalition, then there would have been a status of forces agreement, and U.S. forces would have remained in Iraq as a counter balance to the Shia extremists and the Sunni Extremists, instead we have the mess Obama made by supporting the Shia government's defacto coup using the Iraqi military that the U.S. was supporting, and to some degree, still leading at the time of the coup.
As it happens, I was actually in Tikrit base (US) when the Iraqi Army "surrounded" the opposition political headquarters. If, that is, you call three days of shelling "surrounding". I got very jumpy at all the explosions, as did everyone else. And no, you won't find that in any US news reports, at least none that I saw. (For that matter, I was also in Kirkuk when the Iraqi VP (Halabani?) was hiding after being accused of running death squads. The car bombs were pretty loud that day, I remember a double explosion quite well, word I got was that a judge had his car blow up, and when his family tried to follow him to the hospital their car blew up.
To expect the US govt to go to war against the Iraqi govt they set up a few years before would have been a bit much, and "support" doesn't mean anything when the shelling started a day or two after the election.
The SOFA was signed in 2007 under Bush, expecting Obama to overthrow the Iraqi govt and get the new govt to sign a different SOFA is really unrealistic. And that's what it would have taken. Maliki stated repeatedly "I support the Bush plan" - another little item the US papers didn't report.
And yes, I got around Iraq a LOT in those days. There's not many cities I haven't been in, one way or another. Frankly, the only part of Iraq worth a tinker's damn is in the North, past Kirkuk. Arbil is a very nice place, and probably worth twice what everything else I've seen in Iraq lumped together is worth.
[quote="Reality Check"][quote="Trevor"]
There is one other thing that should be said on this. However tempting it would be to blame Obama for all of this (and being an Obama-hater, I wish I could) he really can't do anything else even if he wanted to. His disengagement from the world is the most popular policy he has. Americans do not want another war under any circumstances whatsoever.
[/quote]
The situation in Iraq would have been very different if Obama had done the right thing after the election where the non-religious coalition won the majority, and the U.S. did not support them at a time the government could not stand without U.S. intelligence and logistic support for their military.
If the U.S. had thrown their support behind the democratic coalition, then there would have been a status of forces agreement, and U.S. forces would have remained in Iraq as a counter balance to the Shia extremists and the Sunni Extremists, instead we have the mess Obama made by supporting the Shia government's defacto coup using the Iraqi military that the U.S. was supporting, and to some degree, still leading at the time of the coup.[/quote]
As it happens, I was actually in Tikrit base (US) when the Iraqi Army "surrounded" the opposition political headquarters. If, that is, you call three days of shelling "surrounding". I got very jumpy at all the explosions, as did everyone else. And no, you won't find that in any US news reports, at least none that I saw. (For that matter, I was also in Kirkuk when the Iraqi VP (Halabani?) was hiding after being accused of running death squads. The car bombs were pretty loud that day, I remember a double explosion quite well, word I got was that a judge had his car blow up, and when his family tried to follow him to the hospital their car blew up.
To expect the US govt to go to war against the Iraqi govt they set up a few years before would have been a bit much, and "support" doesn't mean anything when the shelling started a day or two after the election.
The SOFA was signed in 2007 under Bush, expecting Obama to overthrow the Iraqi govt and get the new govt to sign a different SOFA is really unrealistic. And that's what it would have taken. Maliki stated repeatedly "I support the Bush plan" - another little item the US papers didn't report.
And yes, I got around Iraq a LOT in those days. There's not many cities I haven't been in, one way or another. Frankly, the only part of Iraq worth a tinker's damn is in the North, past Kirkuk. Arbil is a very nice place, and probably worth twice what everything else I've seen in Iraq lumped together is worth.