Quote:
Originally Posted by VTHokieFan
|
Pre-emptive or humanitarian? There's a big difference between the two.
I just looked up Mt. Sinjar on Google maps. It's a very long ridge, that can be ascended in many places by vehicles, and the 100 special forces Obama dropped on it are there to provide very much needed ground info for the food and water drops we are supplying to the Yazidis, a people who are of Kurdish origin, native to Iraq, and worship a form of Islam that combines elements of the 2 major Islamic faiths, Shiia and Sufi.
The Sufi consider the Yazidis to be heretics. ISIS has vowed to wipe them all out to the last person. The Kurds of N. Iraq are the United States' most reliable allies in Iraq. Yazidis are their close cousins.
Do we allow ISIS to slaughter 12 thousand Kurdish Yazidi after we protected as many Kurds from similar extinction during Desert Storm in 1990?
Back then, Saddam was hell bent on killing Kurds, and had several thousand of them trapped, just as the Yazidi are trapped now on Mt. Sinjar.
President G.W. Bush didn't want in intervene, but he was convinced by his cabinet to do so, in Operation Provide Comfort, which stopped Saddam's killing machine. Maybe you remember seeing pictures of dead Kurds from back then who were victims of Saddam's poison gas attacks.
Or maybe not. Most Americans have long forgotten that humanitarian rescue, but the Kurds have not. They have been our loyal allies ever since, and their persh merga militia, under the command of the Kurdish Regional Government, have been the only Iraqi nationals to put up a hard fight against ISIS since ISIS invaded Iraq.
The Kurds control all the oil fields in Iraq, and currently have the only working pipelines and refineries in the country. Like the areas of Iraq that were controlled by the Sunnis and Shia, their pesh merga is a lightly armed militia force. ISIS has seized most of Iraq's heavy military equipment now, including heavy artillery, ammunition, heavy trucks, and all the other big stuff needed to mount full war.
Do we go against every humanitarian effort we have done in the past 70 years now? Are we willing to desert a loyal ally now, when the most critical place on the planet is watching our moves very closely?
Are we willing to let a half-assed airlift fail because we are loathe to put some spotters on the ground, so the supplies won't fall into the hands of ISIS? Or are we going to do this right, like we did in Berlin, where we went all out and stopped the Russians in their tracks?
That big mountain has no water or food sources on it. The Yazidi are sitting ducks. The Kurds can't come to their help as they're fighting for every inch of their territory right now. The Syrian border, where the Yazidi won't be massacred if they can reach it, is only about 40 kilometers away.
I was completely against the war in Iraq, but it happened. If America deserts our best ally there, as sure as God made green apples, Americans will become entangled again, when ISIS goes after the Kurds in Turkey, our NATO ally to the north and Jordan, our ally in the south. if Jordan goes to war, it will spread to Israel, Lebanon, and Egypt.
Take a long look at any map and decide for yourself what's worthy or not.
For me, it looks like showing ISIS what it's like to fight us on Mt. Sinjar, a place where we can whip them with our aircraft, is better than getting dragged into 10-15 more years of full warfare. Did the Russians go to war with us because of Berlin? Nope. Mt. Sinjar is a repeat of Berlin for this century. It is also our best hope of avoiding becoming involved in a much heavier way in a year or less.
If we want the nations of the middle east to fight it out among themselves, this is our best chance of seeing it happen. Iraq was very easy for ISIS to over-run, but keeping Iraq is completely different. If ISIS learns there are limits to their ability, they will be less enthusiastic about widening their fight. That's about as much as we can hope for.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
