Yep...looks like the chap is fighting shape and ready to take on ISIS! He certainly has no issues taking on the camel
The first clue this was a bad policy was the original clueless twins, McCain and Graham, supported it. Among the more obvious questions, as raised by Rand Paul, are how do we know that these so-called moderates are in fact moderates? What keeps them from changing their stripes? If they overthrow Assad, how do we keep the worst elements from taking over, you know, like they did in Libya after Obama charged in there without congressional approval? And why do we always have to foot the bill? Last time I looked, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who fund ISIS and other sunni terro groups, have plenty of money to spread around.
As a retired head of the Marine Corp states that Obama's stratgy on ISIS hasn't got a snowballs chance in hell of working, the focus of the left turns to really important things like the governance of the NFL, and it's insensitivity to women.
To understand the conflict in Iraq is to understand the root causes of most animosities in the Middle East. Until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the 20th century, the Middle East wasn’t made up of countries. The entire region spanning from Iran in the East to Egypt in the West, and Yemen in the South, was a bunch of territories, locally ruled by tribal chiefs, sultans and sheiks. These territories were roped under one empire from the 16th century—the Ottomans. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1919 as result of World War 1, the people living in the Middle East expected and were promised independence. Instead, the West (Britain, U.S. and France) carved the region up into artificially created nations, with no regard given to culture, ethnicity and history, but much regard given to the region’s oil fields. “Regions that had functioned as one, such as Greater Syria, were fractured; regions that had always been separate were smashed together, such as Iraq.” writes Melissa Rossi inWhat Every American Should Know About the Middle East. Prior to its formation in 1932, Iraq was a collection of separate city-states: Mosul, Baghdad and Basra. Under a British mandate, the three cities were pulled together under one umbrella because that made it easier for the British to administer the new country’s oil production and sales. When the British drew maps of the Middle East, the movement of a border/line one way or the other often meant billions of gallons of oil reserves lost or gained. Our overthrow of Saddam and the de-Baathification of the Iraqi government put more than 1 million Sunni Iraqis on the streets, and pushed another several million into the refugee camps of neighboring Sunni states. Thus the genesis of ISIS. . . . If a “caliphate” has been established, it’s an American caliphate in the Middle East. With a total of 44 U.S. military bases in the Middle East and the Central Asia, some of which are the size of small cities, we have the Muslim world completely surrounded. From Turkey to Saudi Arabia, from Uzbekistan to Kyrgyzstan, our bases serve as a constant reminder to Muslims that we control their economic future and we are here to stay. And with an economic future that looks bleak for Muslims, the embers for Muslim rage are stoked. If the Middle East were to cut the U.S. off from its oil exports, the U.S. wouldn’t have enough oil to last more than two to four years. That's the reason why the U.S. has invested more treasure, sold more arms, sent more soldiers, and fought more wars than any other region in the world. “In that largely Muslim part of the world, [Iraq] the U.S. left a grim record that we in this country generally tend to discount or forget when we decry the barbarism of others,” writes Tom Englehardt. Chris Hedges claims the beheading of Foley and Sotloff are the result of years, at times decades, of the random violence, brutal repression and collective humiliation the United States has inflicted on others. Hedges writes: "Our terror is delivered to the wretched of the earth with industrial weapons. It is, to us, invisible. We do not stand over the decapitated and eviscerated bodies left behind on city and village streets by our missiles, drones and fighter jets. We do not listen to the wails and shrieks of parents embracing the shattered bodies of their children. We do not see the survivors of air attacks bury their mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters. We are not conscious of the long night of collective humiliation, repression and powerlessness that characterizes existence in Israel’s occupied territories, Iraq and Afghanistan. We do not see the boiling anger that war and injustice turn into a caldron of hate over time. We are not aware of the very natural lust for revenge against those who carry out or symbolize this oppression. We see only the final pyrotechnics of terror, the shocking moment when the rage erupts into an inchoate fury and the murder of innocents. And, willfully ignorant, we do not understand our own complicity. We self-righteously condemn the killers as subhuman savages who deserve more of the violence that created them. This is a recipe for endless terror." To maintain control of the Middle East’s cheap oil supplies, we have engaged in industrial slaughter. To achieve our ends, we have propped despotic regimes and brutal dictators, overthrown democratically elected governments, and waged three wars in two decades on Muslim soil. All while we fund and are complicit in Israel’s illegal occupation and theft of Palestinian land. . . . The Suicide Terrorism Database at Flinders University in Australiaaccounts for all suicide bombings committed in the Middle East between 1981 and 2006. The results of this study are conclusive: it is politics, not religious fanaticism that leads to terrorists blowing themselves up. The study shows that “though religion can play a vital role in the recruitment and motivation of potential future suicide bombers, their real driving-force is a cocktail of motivations including politics, humiliation, revenge, retaliation and altruism. The configuration of these motivations is related to the specific circumstances of the political conflict behind the rise of suicide attacks in different countries.” . . . CJ Werleman