Iraq, Syria United States military escalation

This video from England is called 15th February 2003: Stop the Iraq War, London.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Obama turns to air strikes against Isis

Friday 12th September 2014

President adopts bloody policy but ‘no boots on the ground’

It took us President Barack Obama just one TV speech to reverse the supposed central tenets of his presidency on Wednesday night.

He rose to political prominence in part because of early opposition to the Iraq war and he shied away from air strikes on Syria last year.

But now Mr Obama has picked up the war drum and beaten it resoundingly, authorising strikes in Syria for the first time in a military campaign against the Islamic State (Isis) terrorist group.

Bombing Syria with the armed opposition in Syria as allies, will help Isis. As that armed opposition consists of, apart from Isis itself, the Al Nusra Front, being the official Al Qaeda branch in Syria; and disparate supposedly ‘moderate’ groups, loosely referred to as ‘Free Syrian Army’. I write supposedly ‘moderate’ as, eg, the family of journalist Steven Sotloff, recently beheaded by Isis, accuses these ‘moderates’ of selling Steven Sotloff to Isis.

The president claimed that while there was no evidence Isis was plotting to strike the US, “if left unchecked, these terrorists could pose a growing threat beyond the region, including to the US.”

More US troops will be sent to assist Iraqi security forces and conduct intelligence flights, bringing the total dispatched to more than 1,500.

“We will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are,” Mr Obama said.

“I will not hesitate to take action against Isis in Syria, as well as Iraq.” And he warned: “This is a core principle of my presidency. If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.”

But the military would not be dragged into a ground war, Mr Obama claimed.

“American forces will not have a combat mission,” he said, and the campaign “will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.”

US senators seized on the president’s apparent confusion. “No boots on the ground sounds odd when 1,100 US troops have been sent back to Iraq,” commented Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, both of whom are members of the Senate armed services committee.

“Additional US special forces and advisers are needed to direct precision air strikes, advise foreign partners on the ground and possibly conduct targeted operations against the Isis leadership.”

However, not all Senate views were so hawkish.

Democratic senator Mark Udall, also a member of the services committee, said: “The American people must be assured we are not pursuing another open-ended conflict in the Middle East and I will not give this or any other president a blank cheque to begin another land war in Iraq.”

Also from the Morning Star:

Bombing Isis will not work

Friday 12th September 2014

President Obama may think his Middle East strategy has gone from non-existent to coherent in just a few days, but he would be sorely mistaken.

His gung-ho message to the American people on Wednesday night was more belligerent bluster than strategic common sense.

He vows to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the throat-cutting terrorists of Isis by extending the month-long US bombing campaign in Iraq and launching air strikes in Syria for the first time.

Yet the notion that the US can bomb its way to a solution to every perceived problem has already been utterly discredited by the bloody chaos engulfing Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya in recent years.

Ah yes, the US Commander in Chief tells us, but this next military intervention will be different. The US will spearhead a coalition of European and Middle East forces without putting in any US ground troops.

Except that we’ve seen such ‘coalitions of the willing’ before. They invariably turn out to be a fig-leaf for US-directed operations which primarily serve US geopolitical and big business interests.

There is also something deeply incongruous about some of the allies being courted by the White House and the Pentagon.

The royal dictators in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait have done little or nothing to stop their compatriots arming and bankrolling the very Islamic fundamentalists who went to fight in Syria and have now ended up in Isis.

Nato member Turkey allowed these and other foreign jihadists to stream through that country and into Syria in order to try to overthrow the authoritarian but secular regime of President Bashar al Assad in Damascus.

Moreover, it appears that the Turkish “open borders” policy which did so much to strengthen Isis still operates.

Why, in their frenzy, was this issue not raised publicly at last week’s Nato summit by the participants and their media camp followers?

Belatedly, the realisation is now dawning among some politicians and military chiefs that the drive by the US and its allies — each for their own reasons — to subvert Syria was a huge mistake.

The struggle to defeat Isis needs the support of all secular, democratic, left and progressive forces in the region. Violating Syrian sovereignty with unauthorised US air strikes will make that support all the more unlikely.

As for Obama’s assurances of no US army boots on the ground, the trainers and advisers are already being sent in alongside those US and British “special forces” almost certainly in Iraq already.

The body bags will still fill up, even though some may be kept as secret as when the British SAS was hired out to shore up the dictatorship in the rotten Gulf state of Oman.

And nothing will add more lustre to bogus IS claims that it represents Muslims in a holy war against Western imperialism than the direct involvement of US and Nato forces in Iraq and Syria.

That’s why it’s vital to construct an anti-Isis coalition in which the governments of Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran, Syria, Syrian Kurdistan and Lebanon co-ordinate a fight against Isis in the name of equality and respect for all religious, ethnic and national groups in the region.

That would deserve support from the wider world, legitimised by the United Nations and best channelled through its agencies.

TEN Arab countries promised US Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday to “do their share” in the fight against Islamic State (Isis) militants, but Nato member Turkey refused to join in: here.

Obama’s speech on ISIS: Perpetual war in Iraq, Syria and beyond: here. See also here.

VENEZUELAN president Nicolas Maduro became the spokesman for the world’s progressive voices on Thursday when he laid into US president Barack Obama’s announcement that he would authorise attacks on the Islamic State (Isis) group inside Syria. The outspoken president accurately blamed Washington’s support of President Bashar al-Assad’s foes for the emergence of the terror group: here.