June 17, 2014

Paul Wolfowitz thinks 'you' are too stupid to know the difference between Sunni and Shia (MSNBC)

Just now with Chuck Todd... Wolfowitz just said that telling people the names Sunni and Shia is too complicated for Americans... they just need to know 'terrorism', 9/11 ... (paraphrase)...

June 16, 2014

Who Funded the Sunni Warlords in Iraq? the USA Did...

Gen. Petraeus' policy (and Maliki's arrogant incompetence) have led directly to the the Sunni warlords and ISIS knocking on the door of Baghdad:

We were paying the warlords off to the tune of around $150 Million per year....

This strategy has combined with other developments -- especially the fact that so much ethnic cleansing has already occurred and that violence in civil wars tends to ebb and flow, as the contending sides work to consolidate gains and replenish losses -- to bring about the current drop in violence. The Sunni sheiks, meanwhile, are getting rich from the surge. The United States has budgeted $150 million to pay Sunni tribal groups this year, and the sheiks take as much as 20 percent of every payment to a former insurgent -- which means that commanding 200 fighters can be worth well over a hundred thousand dollars a year for a tribal chief. Although Washington hopes that Baghdad will eventually integrate most former insurgents into the Iraqi state security services, there are reasons to worry that the Sunni chiefs will not willingly give up what has become an extremely lucrative arrangement... http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/63398/steven-simon/the-price-of-the-surge

June 16, 2014

ISIS is Being Exploited in the Media as a Bogeyman- Iraq in on the Brink of Full-Blown Sectarian War

Here are some key points to keep in-mind from the Brookings Institute:

It’s a Coalition, not a Single Group. First, ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) is essentially the “lead dog” of a larger Sunni militant coalition—hence my preference for the latter, more accurate description. ISIS has been fighting in conjunction with a number of other Iraqi Sunni militant groups. Effectively the entire rogue’s gallery of Sunni militias from the 2006-2008 civil war have been revived by Prime Minister Maliki’s alienation of the Sunni Arab community since 2011. AQI, the Naqshbandis, the Ba’th, Jaysh al-Muhammad, Ansar al-Sunnah, and all of the rest are back in operation in Iraq, in at least tacit cooperation with a number of Sunni tribes.

These groups are key members of the Sunni militant coalition. They have done a great deal of the fighting, dying and occupying. Often they are indistinguishable from one another to outsiders or even Iraqis who are not themselves Sunni militants.

Many of these groups are the very same ones that were bribed by Petraeus in his policy with the Sunni warlords...

Another thing to consider is this that ISIS is essentially a militia, NOT A TERRORIST ORGANIZATION.

These are Militias First and Foremost, Terrorists only a Distant Second. Here as well, Prime Minister Maliki and his apologists like to refer to the Sunni militants as terrorists. Too often, so too do American officials. Without getting into arcane and useless debates about what constitutes a “terrorist,” as a practical matter it is a mistake to think of these groups as being principally a bunch of terrorists.

The problem there is that that implies that what these guys mostly want to do is to blow up building or planes elsewhere around the world, and particularly American buildings and planes. While I have no doubt that there are some among the Sunni militants who want to blow up American buildings and planes right now, and many others who would like to do so later, that is not their principal motivation... http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2014/06/14-iraq-military-situation-pollack

Everyone needs to do a re-boot and quickly forget what the misinformation the MSM and the right-wing hawks have been dishing out this week.

Almost makes you wonder how many millions of taxpayer dollars are flowing to Iraq right now to stop the Sunni march on Baghdad... trust me, it's happening.